Page:Daughters of Genius.djvu/53

 "If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now."

But it was too late, and her sufferings rapidly increased. At two o'clock Charlotte and Anne implored her to let them get her to her room and to her bed.

"No! no!" she exclaimed, and tried to rise, leaning heavily upon the sofa. In that act she died.

Mr. Brontë, Charlotte, and Anne, who was already dying of the same disease, followed her to the grave; and with them walked Emily's great mastiff, "Keeper," following them even into the church, where he lay quietly throughout the services. After the funeral he went up to Emily's room and laid himself down across the threshhold of her door, where he remained for many days, howling piteously when they tried to entice him away.

Charlotte's next novel was "Shirley;" the heroine of which, the gay and independent Shirley Keeldar, is a portrait of Emily Brontë, as her loving sister believed she would have been had she been fortunate and happy. Many of Emily's traits, some even of the incidents of her life, are given in this book. "Keeper" figures in it as Tartar; Shirley's habit of sitting upon a rug, reading. with her arm about the great dog's neck, was also Emily's; and in "Captain Keeldar," we recognize an alteration of Emily's nickname of the Major. The famous incident of the mad dog, too, happened to Emily as well as to Shirley, It was no fiction. But, although Shirley is a pleasing and a noble girl, and shows Emily in a more attractive light than ever shone upon her in real life, yet we miss some of the real Emily's most striking characteristics. We miss her patient endurance of hard drudgery, her faithful household affections, and her thoughtful kindnesses for others. It is not easy to imagine a Shirley Keeldar rising early in the morning and performing the hardest portion of the household labor in order to spare an aged servant; yet that was what Emily Brontë did.