And by an awful irony her religion failed her. She knew its bitterness,
its terrors, its exactions. She never knew its ecstasies, its flaming
mysteries, nor, even at her very last, its consolations. Her tender
conscience drew an unspeakable torment from the spectacle of her
brother's degradation.

For it was on Anne, who had no genius to sustain her, that poor
Branwell, with the burden of his destiny, weighed most hard. It was Anne
at Thorp Green who had the first terrible misgivings, the intolerable
premonitions.

That wretched story is always cropping up again. The lady whom Mrs.
Gaskell, with a murderous selection of adjectives, called "that mature
and wicked woman", has been cleared as far as evidence and common sense
could clear her. But the slander is perpetually revived. It has always
proved too much for the Brontë biographers. Madame Duclaux published it
again twenty years after, in spite of the evidence and in spite of Mrs.
Gaskell's retractation. You would have thought that Branwell might have
been allowed to rest in the grave he dug for himself so well. But no,
they will not let him rest. Branwell drank, and he ate opium; and, as if
drink and opium and erotic madness were not enough, they must credit
him with an open breach of the seventh commandment as well. M. Dimnet,
the most able of recent critics of the Brontës, thinks and maintains
against all evidence that there was more in it than Branwell's madness.
He will not give up the sordid tragedy _à trois_. He thinks he knows
what Anne thought of Branwell's behaviour, and what awful secret she was
hinting at, and what she told her sisters when she came back to Haworth.
He argues that Anne Brontë saw and heard things, and that her testimony
is not to be set aside.