Chapter XI: Chapter XXI

Tabitha Aykroyd's child-apparition Tabitha Aykroyd's child-apparition
as a token of calamity to Branwell as a token of calamity to Branwell
Brontë. Brontë.

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Says Mrs. Dean [Tabitha]: "I Presentiments are strange
came to a stone which serves as things! ... and so are signs....
a guide-post to ... the Heights Sympathies I believe exist (for
and the village.... Hindley instance, between far-distant
[Branwell Brontë] and I held it ... wholly estranged relatives).
a favourite spot twenty years When I was a ... girl I heard
before, ... and ... it appeared Bessie [Tabitha Aykroyd] say
that I beheld my ... playmate that to dream of children was a
seated on the ... turf, ... his sure sign of trouble.... During
little hand scooping out the the last week scarcely a night
earth."[27] had gone ... that had not
brought ... the dream of an
"Poor Hindley!" [Branwell infant which I ... watched
Brontë] I exclaimed playing with daisies on a lawn
involuntarily. I started--my or ... dabbling its hands in
bodily eye was cheated in the running water.[27] It was a
belief that the child lifted its wailing child this night, ... a
face and stared straight into laughing one the next, ... but
mine! It vanished in a whatever mood the apparition
twinkling; but immediately I evinced ... it failed not ... to
felt an irresistible yearning to meet me.... I grew nervous....
be at the Heights. Superstition It was from companionship with
urged me to comply with this this baby-phantom I had been
impulse--"Suppose he were dead! roused ... when I heard the cry:
... supposing it were a sign of and on the ... day following ...
death!" I found a man [Bessie's husband]
waiting for me; ... he was ...
in deep mourning, and the hat in
his hand was surrounded with a
crape band.

"I hope no one is dead," I said.
And the man replies that John
Reed [Branwell Brontë] had got
into great trouble and was dead.

Branwell Brontë was not dead when Charlotte Brontë wrote those two versions, but it seems certain that an apparition of a child in some period of Charlotte's life preceded a further debasement of Branwell, the original of Hindley Earnshaw and John Reed. We may note Charlotte Brontë's Method II., in regard to Hindley.

In Charlotte Brontë's _The Professor_ we find reference to her child-phantom wailing outside, and to the eerie, premonitory signal made against a lattice, as in her _Wuthering Heights_:--

_Wuthering Heights._ _The Professor._