Who dare say if that marriage was happy? Mrs. Gaskell, writing in the life and for the eyes of Mr. Brontë, speaks of his unwearied care, his devotion in the night-nursing. But before that fatal illness was declared, she lets fall many a hint of the young wife's loneliness during her husband's lengthy, ineffectual studies; of her patient suffering of his violent temper. She does not say, but we may suppose, with what inward pleasure Mrs. Brontë witnessed her favourite silk dress cut into shreds because her husband's pride did not choose that she should accept a gift; or watched the children's coloured shoes thrown on the fire, with no money in her purse to get new ones; or listened to her husband's cavil at the too frequent arrival of his children; or heard the firing of his pistol-shots at the out-house doors, the necessary vent of a passion not to be wreaked in words. She was patient, brave, lonely, and silent. But Mr. Wemyss Reid, who has had unexampled facilities for studying the Brontë papers, does not scruple to speak of Mr. Brontë's "persistent coldness and neglect" of his wife, his "stern and peremptory" dealings with her, of her "habitual dread of her lordly master"; and the manuscript which I have once already quoted alludes to the "hard and inflexible will which raised itself sometimes into tyranny and cruelty." It is within the character of the man that all this should be true. Safely wed, the woman to whom he had made hot love would experience no more of his impulsive tenderness. He had provided for her and done his duty; her duty was to be at hand when he needed her. Yet, imminent death once declared, all his uprightness, his sense of honour, would call on him to be careful to the creature he had vowed to love and cherish, all his selfishness would oblige him to try and preserve the mother of six little children under seven years of age. "They kept themselves very close," the village people said; and at least in this last illness the husband and wife were frequently together. Their love for each other, new revived and soon to close, seemed to exclude any thought of the children. We hear expressly that Mr. Brontë, from natural disinclination, and Mrs. Brontë, from fear of agitation, saw very little of the small earnest babies who talked politics together in the "children's study," or toddled hand in hand over the neighbouring moors.