Then suddenly there comes a break--a cleavage. It comes with that Chapter Twenty-four, which is headed "The Valley of the Shadow of Death". It was written in the first months after Emily Brontë's death.
From that point Charlotte's level strength deserts her. Ever after, she falls and soars, and soars and falls again. There is a return to the manner of _Jane Eyre_, the manner of Charlotte when she is deeply moved; there is at times a relapse to Jane Eyre's worst manner. You get it at once in "The Valley of the Shadow" chapter, in the scene of Caroline's love-sick delirium.
"'But he will not know I am ill till I am gone; and he will come when they have laid me out, and I am senseless, cold and stiff.
"'What can my departed soul feel then? Can it see or know what happens to the clay? Can spirits, through any medium, communicate with living flesh? Can the dead at all revisit those they leave? Can they come in the elements? Will wind, water, fire lend me a path to Moore?
"'Is it for nothing the wind sounds almost articulate sometimes--sings as I have lately heard it sing at night--or passes the casement sobbing, as if for sorrow to come? Does nothing then haunt it--nothing inspire it?'"
The awful improbability of Caroline is more striking because of its contrast with the inspired rightness of the scene of Cathy's delirium in _Wuthering Heights_. It is Charlotte feebly echoing Emily, and going more and more wrong up to her peroration.
Delirious Caroline wonders: "'What is that electricity they speak of, whose changes make us well or ill; whose lack or excess blasts; whose even balance revives?...'
"'_Where_ is the other world? In _what_ will another life consist? Why do I ask? Have I not cause to think that the hour is hasting but too fast when the veil must be rent for me? Do I not know the Grand Mystery is likely to break prematurely on me? Great Spirit, in whose goodness I confide; whom, as my Father, I have petitioned night and morning from early infancy, help the weak creation of Thy hands! Sustain me through the ordeal I dread and must undergo! Give me strength! Give me patience! Give me--oh, _give me_ FAITH!'"
Jane Eyre has done worse than that, so has Rochester; but somehow, when they were doing their worst with it, they got their passion through. There is no live passion behind this speech of Caroline's, with its wild stress of italics and of capitals. What passion there was in Charlotte when she conceived Caroline was killed by Emily's death.