[Footnote A:  “Emily Bronte”:  Eminent Women Series.]

She dragged herself down to the sitting-room, and died there, about two o’clock.  She must have had some horror of dying in that room of death overhead; for, at noon, when the last pains seized her, she refused to be taken back to it.  Unterrified, indomitable, driven by her immortal passion for life, she fought terribly.  Death took her as she tried to rise from the sofa and break from her sisters’ arms that would have laid her there.  Profoundly, piteously alienated, she must have felt that Anne and Charlotte were in league with death; that they fought with her and bound her down; and that in her escape from them she conquered.

Another month and Anne sickened.  As Emily died of Branwell’s death, so Emily’s death hastened Anne’s.  Charlotte wrote in the middle of January:  “I can scarcely say that Anne is worse, nor can I say she is better....  The days pass in a slow, dull march:  the nights are the test; the sudden wakings from restless sleep, the revived knowledge that one lies in her grave, and another, not at my side, but in a separate and sick bed.”  And again in March:  “Anne’s decline is gradual and fluctuating, but its nature is not doubtful.”  And yet again in April:  “If there were no hope beyond this world ...  Emily’s fate, and that which threatens Anne, would be heartbreaking.  I cannot forget Emily’s death-day; it becomes a more fixed, a darker, a more frequently recurring idea in my mind than ever.  It was very terrible.  She was torn, conscious, panting, reluctant, though resolute, out of a happy life.”

Mrs. Oliphant has censured Emily Bronte for the manner of her dying.  She might as well have censured Anne for drawing out the agony.  For Anne was gentle to the end, utterly submissive.  She gave death no trouble.  She went, with a last hope, to Scarborough, and died there at the end of May.  She was buried at Scarborough, where she lies alone.  It is not easy to believe that she had no “preference for place”, but there is no doubt that even to that choice of her last resting-place she would have submitted—­gently.

“I got here a little before eight o’clock.  All was clean and bright, waiting for me.  Papa and the servants were well, and all received me with an affection that should have consoled.  The dogs seemed in strange ecstasy.  I am certain that they regarded me as the harbinger of others.  The dumb creatures thought that as I was returned, those who had been so long absent were not far behind....  I felt that the house was all silent, the rooms were all empty.  I remembered where the three were laid—­in what narrow, dark dwellings—­never more to reappear on earth....  I cannot help thinking of their last days, remembering their sufferings, and what they said and did, and how they looked in mortal affliction....  To sit in a lonely room, the clock ticking loud through a still house....”  Charlotte could see nothing else before her.