And yet for all that, after London, after fame and friendships in which her dead had no share, her marriage was not the great departure; it was the great return.  It was the outcome of all that had gone before it; the fruit of painful life, which is recognition, acceptance, the final trust in destiny.  There were to be no more false starts, no more veiled ghosts of the cross-roads, pointing the disastrous way.

And in its abrupt and pitiful end her life rang true; it sustained the tragic harmony.  It was the fulfilment of secret prophecies, forebodings, premonitions, of her reiterated “It was not to be.”  You may say that in the end life cheated and betrayed her.

And inevitably; for she had loved life, not as Emily loved it, like an equal, with power over it and pride and an unearthly understanding, virgin and unafraid.  There was something slightly subservient, consciously inferior, in Charlotte’s attitude to life.  She had loved it secretly, with a sort of shame, with a corroding passion and incredulity and despair.  Such natures are not seldom victims of the power they would propitiate.  It killed her in her effort to bring forth life.

When the end came she could not realize it.  For the first time she was incredulous of disaster.  She heard, out of her last stupor, her husband praying that God would spare her, and she whispered, “Oh, I am not going to die, am I?  He will not separate us; we have been so happy.”

You can see her youth rising up beside that death-bed and answering, “That is why.”

And yet, could even Charlotte’s youth have been so sure as to the cheating and betrayal?  That happiness of hers was cut short in the moment of its perfection.  She was not to suffer any disenchantment or decline; her love was not to know any cold of fear or her genius any fever of frustration.  She was saved the struggle we can see before her.  Arthur Nicholls was passionately fond of Charlotte.  But he was hostile to Charlotte’s genius and to Charlotte’s fame.  A plain, practical, robust man, inimical to any dream.  He could be adorably kind to a sick, submissive Charlotte.  Would he have been so tender to a Charlotte in revolt?  She was spared the torture of the choice between Arthur Nicholls and her genius.  We know how she would have chosen.  It is well for her, and it is all one to literature, that she died, not “in a time of promise”, but in the moment of fulfilment.

* * * * *

No.  Of these tragic Brontes the most tragic, the most pitiful, the most mercilessly abused by destiny, was Anne.  An interminable, monstrous exile is the impression we get of Anne’s life in the years of her girlhood.  There is no actual record of them.  Nobody kept Anne’s letters.  We never hear her sad voice raised in self-pity or revolt.  It is doubtful if she ever raised it.  She waited in silence and resignation, and then told her own story in Agnes Grey.  But her figure