With What Matter

by Charlotte Brontë, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Our village lay at the bottom of the bank and the church stood at the top of it, and between the two there was a mile of road so steep that the carrier's horse would not take it loaded, and so bad in winter that the dead of Thorne Wyke were carried up it on men's shoulders, with a rest at the stone halfway. I knew that road as I knew my own hands. I had gone up it every Sunday of my life to sit under Mr. Dalby, and come down it every Sunday afternoon with the sea in front of me, spread out grey to the edge of the world, and the red roofs of the Wyke tumbled down the cleft below as if someone had emptied them out of a basket and left them where they fell.

I was eleven years old in the winter I mean to tell of, which was the winter of 1840. My father fished a coble with my uncle Isaac, and in a good year we did well enough; but the herring had failed in the autumn, and the long-lines brought up little but dogfish, and by Christmas we were eating the potatoes we had meant to keep for seed. My mother was brought to bed in the first week of January, a fortnight before her time. The child was a girl. She was so small that my father could hold her along his one hand from the wrist to the fingers' ends, and he sat by the fire doing that, the first evening, saying nothing, for an hour together, while the wind came down off the moor and shook the door on its sneck.

We called her Martha, after my mother's mother. I say called; nobody had named her yet, in the sense I was taught to give the word. That was to be done at the font at St. Ebba's, by Mr. Dalby, in the face of the congregation, as soon as she was strong enough and the weather fit to carry her up the bank. Mr. Dalby did not hold with christening in houses. He had said so from the pulpit more than once, looking down the nave at the Wyke pews as if we were the cause of it: that a child was to be brought to the church and not the church to the child, and that private baptism was a thing allowed for great necessity only, which the idleness of parents had made a common practice. My mother had sat through these sermons with her lips folded in. She was church, and her people had been church; it was my father's family who had gone to the Methodists, and come back again, and gone again, according to the preachers that came through. She meant that Martha should be done properly, at the font, in her christening cap. She had sewn the cap herself in the autumn, before the fishing failed, out of a piece of lawn from a gentlewoman's cast-off, and it lay in the drawer upstairs in blue paper.

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For eight days Martha did very well, or so we told one another. She did not cry much. I see now that she had not the strength to cry; but we said she was a good child, a quiet child, and I held her by the hour while my mother slept, with her face against my neck, where I could feel the small breath come and go like the lap of the tide at slack water, hardly a movement at all.

On the ninth day it came on to blow from the north-east.

I do not think anyone who has not lived on that coast can know what a north-easter is there in January. The sea came up the scaur below the village white from end to end; the spray went over the roofs of the lowest houses and ran down the chimneys and hissed in the fires. The boats were all drawn up the slipway and lashed, and the men stood in the doorway of the Fisherman's Arms with their hands in their pockets and watched the water, as men watch a thing they have no power over and cannot leave alone. All that day the wind got up. By dark it was the loudest I had ever heard, a noise so continuous that after an hour one ceased to hear it as a noise and felt it rather as a pressure upon the whole house, as if the cottage were a fist held shut.

Martha stopped taking the breast at about four o'clock. By six she had gone a bad colour about the mouth. My mother sat with her on her knee by the fire and looked at her, and looked at my father; and I, who was hearing the wind, heard the silence between them under it, and knew what it was.

"Robert," my mother said. "You'll go up for Mr. Dalby."

My father did not answer at once. He looked at the window, where the glass was streaming, and I saw him think of the bank in the dark, and the rest-stone, and the open moor-edge at the top where there is no shelter between the church and Norway. Then he took down his coat from behind the door.

"He'll not come," he said. "Not in this. Not to us."

"He'll come for a dying child. He's a minister. Tell him she's going. Tell him I said."

He went. I heard the wind take the door out of his hand and slam it back, and then I heard nothing but the wind.

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It was a long time after that. I cannot say how long. The clock on our wall had stopped years before and never been mended, and I had only the fire to tell the time by, which I made up three times. My mother did not move from her chair. She talked to Martha a little, low, in the broad speech she used only to babies and to my father when she thought I was asleep. Then she stopped talking, and only held her.

I sat on the cracket by the fender and watched my mother's face, and I thought.

I had been at Sunday school at St. Ebba's since I was six. Miss Thorpe, the curate's sister, kept it, and she was a good teacher in her way, and fond of me, because I learned fast and asked questions she could answer; she had given me a Prayer Book of my own when I could say the whole Catechism without a slip, and I had read it, not as children are supposed to read Prayer Books, a collect at a time, but straight through from the Calendar to the Table of Kindred and Affinity, as I would have read any book that came into my hands, for we had few. And I had read, among the rest, the office for the Private Baptism of Children in Houses. I had read it because I could not think why such an office should be there, if Mr. Dalby was right that it was a thing of idleness; and I had found that it began with a rubric about danger of death, and that it gave the words to be said, and that they were very few.

The words were in my head now. I could see the page. I could see where it said the Minister of the Parish was to do it, or any other lawful Minister that could be procured. I could see, too, the line about the water poured upon the child; and the words themselves, which were the same words as at the font; nothing more was needed, the book said, but those. And I sat on the stool by the fender, and the wind leaned on the house, and the fire went down, and I asked myself, as plainly as I have ever asked myself anything, whether the God who made the north-east wind meant Martha to go out into it without her name because the Minister of the Parish could not be procured.

I tried to think as Mr. Dalby would think. I could not. I could only see Martha's mouth, and my mother's hands.

Then it seemed to me that the matter lay with the One who had made the words and not with the one who was licensed to say them; and that if I was wrong in this, the sin was mine and I would answer for it, but if I was right and did nothing, the loss was Martha's, who could answer for nothing at all. Put so, there was no choosing to be done. I got up.

"Mother," I said, "I'm going to christen her."

My mother looked up at me. I think she did not understand me at first. Then she did, and she looked at me a long while, and I saw that she was afraid, and that she was not afraid of what I meant to do but of letting herself hope it would serve. She said nothing. She did not say no.

There was a pail of sea water by the door that my father had brought up for the floor, and I passed it. I know why I passed it, and I will set it down, because I was asked afterwards and was made to feel that it was childish. I passed it because the sea had been taking things from us all that winter, and that night it was trying for the house; and I would not have it in this. I went out to the back, into the wind, where the rain-butt stood under the eave, and broke the thin ice on it with my fist, and filled the brown jug, and brought it in.

My mother held her. I knelt on the hearth. I wet my fingers and then I thought that was too little, and I tipped the jug, and poured the water over Martha's head, a very little, as the book said; and it ran down over her forehead into her hair, which was dark, like my father's. She did not cry. I said:

"Martha, I baptize thee in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

My voice was steady. I have wondered at that since.

My mother said, "Amen," after me. Then she put her face down to the child's wet head, and held it there.

I would like to set down here that something happened then. The wind did not drop. No light came. The fire did not leap up. My mother told me, many years afterwards, that at the moment I said the words she heard the bell at St. Ebba's ring once in the gale, a mile above us on the top; and that she had always taken it for a sign. I heard no bell. I have stood under that tower in a north-easter since, and I know the bell rope is kept looped up out of reach in the ringing chamber, and I know also that a great wind will do strange things to a bell in a louvred tower. I set down what she said, and what I did not hear, and I let them lie side by side.

Martha died a little before three in the morning, on my mother's knee. Her hair had not dried.

My father came in at four. He had been to the rectory. He had stood in Mr. Dalby's kitchen, wet to the skin, and had been sent up, and had been told by Mr. Dalby, in his dressing-gown at the head of the stairs, that he would not set out across the moor-edge on such a night, a man of sixty-seven, for a child who might very well live till morning; and that if the child lived she should be brought to the church as soon as the weather allowed. My father had come down the bank in the dark on his hands and knees for part of the way. His hands were cut. He stood in the door and looked at us and did not need to be told.

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The funeral was not to be read.

Mr. Dalby sent his message down by the clerk on the second day, when the wind had dropped and the sea was running long and smooth and dark under a sky the colour of pewter. The child, he said, had died unbaptised, and the rubric before the Order for the Burial of the Dead was plain: the Office ensuing is not to be used for any that die unbaptized. She might be put in the ground, on the north side, where such children were put; but there would be no words said over her, and no bell. He was sorry for it. He had always told the Wyke people to bring their children up the bank in good time.

"She's not unbaptised," said my mother. "Our Hannah did it."

The clerk, who was old Jacob Featherstone and had known my mother from a girl, looked at me, standing by the fire; and he looked at me in a way I did not like, not unkindly, but as a man looks at a dog that has been taught to walk on its hind legs. "Did she," he said. "Well. I'll tell him so."

He told him so. The answer came back the same night: that the rubric for Private Baptism required a lawful Minister; that a sprinkling by a child, a female child, at a cottage fire, with no witness but the child's own mother, was not a sacrament of the Church of England but a piece of superstition; and that he would thank the Moorsoms not to make the thing worse by talking of it.

My father said nothing to this. He went out to the slipway and sat on the gunwale of the coble in the dark. My mother went up the stairs, and I heard the drawer open, and then I heard nothing for a long time, and then I heard her crying, as I had not heard her cry in all those days, with the blue paper rustling under her hands.

I sat by the fire, and I felt something in me rise and set, quietly, the way the tide sets against the scaur: not in waves, for waves fall back, but under the waves, the whole weight of the water moving one way, with no noise at all. It was not anger. Anger is a squall. This was older and slower than anger.

In the morning I put on my Sunday frock, and my mother's shawl over it, and went up the bank by myself.

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The rectory stood a little below the church on the landward side, out of the worst of the wind, a square grey house with a holly hedge. The maid knew me from Sunday school and let me into the kitchen and went to ask; and after a while I was taken through into the study, where I had never been, and left standing on the edge of the carpet.

It was a warm room. That is the thing I remember first. There was a coal fire, not a peat one, and the smell of it, and of leather and of snuff; and books on three walls up to the ceiling; and Mr. Dalby at a table in the window with a great book open in front of him and a magnifying glass on the page. He was a big man gone loose with age, with white whiskers and very small, very pale grey eyes, and he looked at me over the glass for some time before he spoke.

"You are the Moorsom girl."

"Yes, sir. Hannah."

"You have come about your sister."

"Yes, sir."

"I have given my answer to your father. You may tell your mother that I am sorry for her trouble." He looked down at his book again. "That is all."

I did not move. It was not courage; I simply did not know how to go away without having done what I had come for. He looked up after a moment, and saw me still there, and something altered a little in his face. I think it amused him. I think he had not been contradicted by a child before, even by standing still.

"Well?"

"Sir," I said, "you didn't ask me."

"Ask you what?"

"What the book says to ask. In the Private Baptism. When the child's brought to church after. It says the minister's to ask questions, sir, to know if it was done right. You never asked them. You sent Jacob."

He put down the glass.

He looked at me for a long time then, with those little pale eyes. I have been looked at so since, by examiners and by men of business and once by a bishop, and I have learned that the look is a kind of weighing; but I did not know it then, and I only stood and bore it, with my hands under my mother's shawl, and my heart going so that I thought he must hear it across the room.

"You have read the office," he said at last.

"Yes, sir."

"Who taught you to read it?"

"Nobody, sir. Miss Thorpe gave me the book."

He reached behind him without looking and took down a small book from the shelf, and opened it, and turned the leaves until he found what he wanted. Then he held it at arm's length, to the window light.

"Very well," he said. "Very well, Hannah Moorsom. By whom was this child baptized?"

"By me, sir."

"Who was present when this child was baptized?"

"My mother, sir." I thought, and added, because I would not leave anything out: "And Martha."

He made a small sound in his nose. He turned the page.

"Because some things essential to this Sacrament may happen to be omitted through fear or haste, in such times of extremity: therefore I demand further of you, With what matter was this child baptized?"

"With water, sir."

"What water?"

"Rain water, sir, out of the butt. I broke the ice on it." And then, because I saw his lip move, and knew he thought me simple, I told him about the pail by the door, and why I had passed it, and gone out into the wind for the rain instead; and I told it badly, and I felt my face burn while I told it, but I told it to the end.

He did not laugh. I had thought he would.

"With what words was this child baptized?"

I said them.

He closed the book upon his finger. The fire settled in the grate. Outside, beyond the holly, I could hear the sea, very far below, drawing back over the shingle and coming in again, slow.

"Your answers are correct," he said. "The matter was right. The words were right. I do not doubt you said them. But you have read the office, Hannah, and you have read its first rubric, and you know as well as I do whom it names. The Minister of the Parish, or in his absence any other lawful Minister that can be procured. You are not a Minister. You are not lawful. You are a child, and a girl. What you did was done in a good spirit, and I dare say it comforted your mother; but it was not baptism, and I cannot read the burial office over it as though it were. I have a duty to the Church in this."

"Then which was it, sir?" I said.

"Which was what?"

"Which was wrong? You said the water was right, and the words. It was the water God made and the words He gave. So it was only me was wrong. I was the only thing in it that wasn't His." I heard my own voice go up, and could not stop it, and did not try. "Then she's to be put in the north side because of me. Not because of anything she did, for she never did anything, sir, she wasn't a fortnight in the world. Because of me, for being eleven, and a girl, and in the house when you weren't. Is that what the Church says? That God couldn't hear the words because of whose mouth they came out of? Then He's not the God in the Catechism, sir. That one sanctifieth me, it says, and all the elect people of God. It never said all the elect people that had a minister by. I learned it. I can say it you. I said it to Miss Thorpe for my book, every word, and she never told me there was a line left out."

I stopped, because I had no more breath, and because the room had gone very quiet, and I was suddenly aware of what I had said and to whom, in his own warm room, with his own books round me; and I was afraid. But I found, looking into my fear, that I was not sorry, and that I would say it again; and I lifted my head and looked at him, and waited to be put out of the house.

"And I wasn't in fear," I said, "nor haste. I thought about it first. A long time. You asked that, and I didn't answer it. I'm answering it now."

Mr. Dalby did not put me out.

He sat a long while with the closed Prayer Book on his knee and his finger in it, looking not at me but at the window, where the fields went down grey to the cliff and the sea lay beyond them flat and enormous to the end of sight. I saw his jaw work once or twice under the white whiskers. I saw his eyes go to the clock on his mantel, and to the fire, and back to the window; and I understood, without knowing how I understood it, that he was not thinking of me at all, but of a night three days gone, and a staircase, and a man wet to the skin in his kitchen with his hands cut.

"Go home," he said at last. "Tell your father to bring her up on Friday, at two o'clock."

"To the north side, sir?"

He did not answer that. He opened his book again on the table, and picked up his glass, and bent his head; and the maid came, and I was taken out.

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On the Friday it was still, and very cold. The snow had come in the night, the first of that winter, and lay thin on the moor-edge and on the gravestones; and we went up the bank, the four of us, my father and my uncle Isaac carrying between them the little box that my uncle had made out of a piece of good deal he had been keeping for a new thwart, and my mother and I behind. We rested at the stone halfway. Nobody spoke. Below us the sea was blue, for the first time in weeks, and quite smooth, with a long low swell coming in out of the north-east that broke white along the whole length of the scaur without a sound that we could hear from so high up.

Mr. Dalby met us at the lych-gate in his surplice. He did not look at me. He turned, and went before us up the path, and as he went he began, in a loud, flat, old man's voice that the cold air carried away over the graves: I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord.

He did not turn to the north.

He read the whole of it, standing at the grave's head on the south side under the chancel wall, with the snow on his shoes and his breath going up white; and I noticed, as one notices things at such times, that after the first page he did not look down at the book in his hands at all, but said it with his eyes on the sea, as a man says a thing he has known by heart for forty years and only now heard. When the earth went in, it was Jacob Featherstone who cast it, and it fell upon the deal with the sound of a hand knocking at a door.

Afterwards, when the others had gone down, I stayed a little by the wall. The snow was beginning again, very fine, out of a sky gone white. It settled on the turned earth and did not melt, and I watched it, flake by flake, until the brown was gone and the place was the same colour as everything round it; and then I went down the bank in the dusk, towards the lights of the Wyke and the sound of the sea coming up to meet me.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Īdūs Octōbrēs (11 October 2026), ā Carolā Brontë per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Charlotte Brontë, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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