fiSiSiiliHflfeliJiWi-iHiliiiifiiii'ftiiJ^^ ■.■■'! iw ■! ;;■•: -ijjIvuL BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME ' FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF 1S91 ..A.-S.U-'^M- : ^.^///Al. Cornell University Library PR4168.W95 The Brontes in Ireland; or, Facts Strang 3 1924 012 942 763 B Cornell University M Library The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924012942763 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND . ©r, jfacts Stranger tban jFiction BY Dr. WILLIAM WRIGHT \ NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY tH' Authorized Edition. PREFACE T TRUST it is unnecessary to say that I dis- claim all responsibility for the Bronte acts, opinions, and sentiments recorded in this book. As no one living could lay claim to Bronte genius, even in its less-cultured condition, no one should be held responsible for the eccentricities of that genius. It is right, however, that I should express my indebtedness to many for generous encouragement and unstinted assistance in setting in order these fragments of an almost forgotten past. In a very special manner I have to acknowledge my obligation to Dr. W. Robertson NicoU, whose sympathy with the Bronte genius is as profound as his knowledge of the literature is unrivalled. Dr. NicoU has the rare power of kindling the zeal of others at his own torch, and but for his enthusiasm the story of The Brontes in Ireland would probably never have been published. The Rev. J. B. Lusk, M.A., now resident in the vi PREFACE Ballynaskeagh manse, has been indefatigable in investigating old documents, and in interviewing old residents, and generally in verifying my accu- mulated facts. Besides enabling me to study the history of the Brontes from new standpoints, he has disposed for ever of the baseless assertion that the family was called " Prunty " in Ireland. The Rev. W. John McCracken of Ballyeaston, Belfast, who knew the Brontes personally, has placed at my disposal, in written form, his recol- lections of the family. The Rev. R. H. Harshaw of Mount Mellick, in whose grandfather's house Hugh Bronte was once a hired servant, has kindly supplied me with valu- able details. The Rev. H. W. Lett, Rector of Aghaderg, Loughbrickland, to whom we owe the recovery of the Drumgooland Vestry-book, has generously given me permission to make use of his summary of that precious document. I am much indebted to the Registrar of Cam- bridge University, and to the Bursar of St. John's College, for information readily and courteously given. They have shown that there was no trace of the name of " Prunty " at Cambridge, as Mr. PREFACE vii Lusk has shown that there was no trace of it in Ireland. From Miss Ellen Nussey, the "Miss E." of the Gaskell biography, and the Caroline Helstone of Shirley, I have heard abundant details regarding the gifted family in England. Miss Nussey is a close observer and a vivid narrator, and during a much-appreciated visit to my house in April 1891 she often made the inmates of the Haworth vicarage live again. Besides Miss Nussey, several other ladies helped me much ; and to many in humble life in Ireland I am deeply indebted for information regarding matters which had fallen within their own obser- vation. When my many helpers discover in these pages little trace of the abundant material which they placed at my disposal, I trust they will remember that the narrative had to be kept within narrow limits, and that every bit of information helped me to come to conclusions on doubtful matters, and contributed to the general result. Besides, there are several important incidents which I have left untold, believing as I do that in such matters the half is more than the whole. viii PREFACE I must also thank my spirited publishers on both sides of the Atlantic for the attractive form in which they have brought out the book. While acknowledging my great indebtedness to the living, I must admit that my obligation to the dead is still greater. WILLIAM WRIGHT. WOOLSTHORPE, NORWOOD, October 1893, CONTENTS CHAPTER I. PAGES THE HIDDEN SOURCES The history of the Brontes and the history of the Nile — Investigations mainly on English soil — Guess- work — The heart of the mystery in Ireland— Mrs. Gaskell's tribute inadequate — Something beyond Mr. Wemyss Reid's theory— Mr. Augustine Birrell's ad- ditional facts and pointless sarcasm — Authors building on an Egyptian model — Mr. Erskine Stuart's prediction. CHAPTER II. THE CHIEF SOURCES OF INFORMATION : PRE- LIMINARY 6 — 14 Exceptional advantages for telling the tale — My nurse's tales — My tutor's recollections — His methods — Early screeds of Bronte novels — The grain of truth in Bran- well's boast — The facts of Wuiherwg Heights — The Todds and McAllisters — Rev. David McKee, the friend and adviser of the BrontSs — The novels first read in his manse — Arrival oijane Eyre — Side lights — Collecting facts. CHAPTER III. GRANDFATHER BRONTE's EARLY HOME . 1 5 t8 Hereditary gift of story-telling — Miss Ellen Nussey's testimony — The girls hanging on their father's lips — Grandfather Bronte and Jane Eyre — Hugh's childhood — An uncle and aunt arrive — Laying plans— Visions of paradise— A night to be remembered — Incidents re- membered — The dressmaker's beverage — Last adieux from brothers and sisters — His mother's caresses — Out in the darkness. X CONTENTS CHAPTER IV. PAGES THE FOUNDLING AND FOSTER-FRIENDS . . I9 — 3 1 The great-great-grandfather of the novelists — Home near Drogheda on the Boyne — Dirty child found on a boat from Liverpool to Drogheda — Mrs. BrontS and the infant — Baby taken home and called Welsh — Brontes golden- haired from the third generation — Welsh's unhappy lot — Meets cruelty by cunning — Clings to great-great-grand- father Hugh — Accompanies him to fairs and markets — The little spy useful — The successful cattle-dealer — Mysterious death of great-great-grandfather Hugh^ Position of the family — Conference with Welsh — Welsh proposes to marry Mary Bronte, his late master's daughter — Rejected with scorn — Welsh's threat — Action of the family — Counter-action of Welsh — A land agent and entourage — Welsh a sub-agent — His business — Helps himself as well as his master — His twofold purpose — Meg a female sub-agent — Her functions — Courtship by proxy — The constant drip — Welsh meets Mary Bronte and carries out his designs — Marriage in secret, pro- claimed on the housetops — Welsh secures the farm — The brothers and the agent— Law and order — Birth of the tenant-right theory. CHAPTER V. THE ADOPTION AND OATH .... 32 — 34 Eviction and vengeance — Burning of the old home — Welsh's repentance— Official oaths and family oaths — The lost clue. CHAPTER VI. A FEARFUL JOURNEY 35 — 50 Welsh without the mask — A child's struggle in the dark — A curse and a blow — Dreaming of home — The careless heavens — Friendless — The tree of knowledge — A child's prayers and doubts— Cause of the cruelty— A strange landscape — ^A halt — Journey continued — The castle CONTENTS xi PAGES couch — Scotch lad and English lady in Arab life — Night journeys and day halts — New clothes — No deliverance — Drogheda reached — At home on the Boyne — Sources of the narrative — Hugh BrontS's dramatic eloquence con- trasted with that of his granddaughters — No traces of the journey — Searching for the Bronte house in vain. CHAPTER VII. A MISERABLE HOME 5 1 — 66 A cold welcome — Settling conditions — Gallagher ap- proves — The Blessed Virgin and saints introduced — An old grievance — Meg and her business — Destruction of bastards — Joseph in IVuthering Heights typed by Gallagher — Heathchffe and Welsh — New company — Description of the mansion — Hugh's illness — Friendship with Keeper — Something to live for — Cocks — Aunt Mary kind — Tells him the Bronte tragedy — Returning spring and health — Keeper at work — Emily BrontS's Keeper — Irish home love — Awaiting his deliverer — Outgrowing his clothes — Growing to his surroundings — Hard slavery — The spy — The devil. CHAPTER VIII. THE CAPTIVE ESCAPES 67 — 75 Welsh's quarrels — A bit of bog — Land agent — An agrarian battle — Welsh worsted — Hugh joins the enemy — Second battle of the Boyne and its results — Words of truth and deferred claims — Chaff bed and rival heir- Promised chastisement — ^A resourceful ally — Presenti- ment — Hugh trounces Gallagher — Final leave-takings Kisses Keeper and plunges into the Boyne — A swim for life — Helped on his second great journey. CHAPTER IX. THE FLIGHT AND REFUGE .... 76 — 78 On solid ground — The fugitive passes through Dun- leer, Castlebellingham, and Dundalk — Turns eastward CONTENTS PAGES towards Carlingford — Finds work at Mount Pleasant Kilns — Burning lime — New clothes — Free labour- Makes a new friend. CHAPTER X. LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT 79 — 82 Visit to County Down — A surprise in store — An Irish eauty — Alice McClory described — Hugh's discomfiture — The Protestant bar — Hugh's eagerness — Alice cold. CHAPTER XI. TRUE LOVE AND PARTY STRIFE . . . 83 — 91 Christmas holidays — Engagement — The Catholics roused — Religious tests — The dying Orangeman — Perio- dical party battles— 12th of July and 17th of March — Weapons — The great religious agitation — An Irish priest — Alice and the priest — Hugh innocent of religion — At- tempt to disarm prejudice — A conference ends in a fight — Conirairyness — A dreadful speech — Hugh among the Philistines — Saved by Alice — Tender good-bye — Hugh's sudden conversion — The deepening of true love. CHAPTER XII. love's SUBTERFUGES 92 — 105 Burning lime — Hugh's inattention — Visits Alice — Secret meetings — The Courting Bower — Traitors — A rival lover produced — Hugh begins his education — A plot — Dismissal — Hired to James Harshaw as a farm labourer — The Harshaws' kind treatment — Hugh's duties — Taught by the children — Hugh's doctrines — The Martins — Jane Harshaw became the mother of John Martin, M.P. — Martin meets Mitchell — Both transported — John Martin and Hugh BrontS's doctrines— Palmerston and Martin — BrontS lost sight of— Alice takes horse exercise — Communicates with Hugh — Burns the rival — Marriage arranged — Preparations — Wedding party arrived — Alice CONTENTS elopes with Hugh — Married in Magherally Church- Burns and the wedding party drink her health— The fugitives forgiven. CHAPTER XIII. LOVE IN A COTTAGE ..... Io6 — II3 At home with Red Paddy — The cottage in Emdale — Present condition of the cottage — Rev. Patrick BrontS's birthplace — The corn-kiln — 17th of March, 1777 — Emdale and Haworth — Happy home — Honest poverty — Re- moval to a lai-ger house — Increasing family — Parish register — Hugh's verses on Alice. CHAPTER XIV. THE DAILY ROUND 114—128 Becking the kiln — A primitive kiln — Payment m kind — Alice's spinning-wheel — BrontSs clad in home-spun — Bronte independence — Bronte a ditcher — BrontS prosperity — MacAdam's discovery — Invention worked by the Brontes — Farming and road-making — A public-house — Turn of the tide — Decadence — Drinking habits — Rev. D. McKee begins the temperance cause — The sermon on the Rechabites — Dr. Edgar reads The Rechabites — Empties his whiskey down the gutter — The temperance crusade. CHAPTER XV. THE IRISH RACONTEUR, OR STORY-TELLER 129— 141 The hakkamdli — His manner — His success — The Irish hakkawati — His hearers — Baby Patrick Bronte — Hugh Bronte a moral teacher — His studies; his books — His superstitions — Patrick inherited his father's gifts — Emily Bronte and her father's stories — Miss Nussey's testimony — Swinburne's insight — Emily's models^ Wuthering Heights thoroughly Bronte — Emily's art — Bronte attributes. xiv CONTENTS CHAPTER XVI. PACKS HUGH BRONTE AS A TENANT-RIGHTER . T42 155 Lecture Bible in hand — Bible and Church— Protestant parsons — Catholic priests — Kings and emperors — King George III. — Landlords — The peasants — Law-making — Land agents and attorneys — The Bronte estate — Land- lord art — Irish law and justice — Obedience — Patriotism — His animus — Battle of Ballynahinch — Hugh's escape — " Every man his own " — The cure for turbulence— Sharman Crawford's tenant-right — Crawford's views — Councillor Dodd — Cruelty to a child and the result, CHAPTER XVII. THE BRONTE FAMILY : GENEALOGICAL . 156 — 162 Summary — Defective records of Drumballyroney^ Bronte baptismal register — The Bronte girls — Rev. John McCracken's testimony. CHAPTER XVIIT. THE BRONTES AL FRESCO . . , 163 — 1 74 McAllister's story — Six Bronte brothers — Ball-rolling — Curious phraseology — Odd appearance — Harvesting . — Local report — The concert in the Glen — Sisters spin- ningand dancing — Brothers fiddling and dancingin turns — The scene— The spectators — Awe of the Brontes — Unsocial. CHAPTER XIX. THE BRONTES, THE DEVIL, AND THE POTATO BLIGHT 175 — 184 The potato blight — Different kinds of farmers and farming— Housekeeping — The lazy poor — Bronte in- dustry—Bronte prosperity — Good landlord — Bronte CONTENTS XV PAGES paradise blasted^Theories — Common belief that the devil blighted the potatoes — Vivid recollections — Hugh Bronte's challenge — Offering to the fiend— Dramatic power. CHAPTER XX. MINOR AMUSEMENTS OF THE BRONTES . 1S5 — 192 Want of a common holiday — Party days — Con- sumption of whiskey — Kind of drink — Fiery potations and orations — Party fights— Party balls — Christmas and New Year's Day — Easter Sunday and eggs — Shooting- matches — Cock-fighting — Patrick as a marksman and sportsman — Wakes and funerals — Boxing — Incident in Rathfriland fair — Gathering may-flowers. CHAPTER XXI. THE GREAT BRONTE BATTLE . . . I93 — 204 The local HSji;ra — The fight between Sam Clarke and Welsh Bronte— Origin of the battle — Peggy Camp- bell — The schoolboys' cruelty — Welsh intervenes — Ducking the cripple — The duckers ducked — The chal- lenge — The preparations — The crowd — Public opinion — Clarke's mother — Welsh's sweetheart — Spartan speech ■ — Long endurance — Final command — Crushing victory — Peaceful result —Traditions — Welsh's repentance. CHAPTER XXII. THE BRONTES AND THE GHOSTS . . 205 — 2li The haunted Glen — A tragedy — Bronte habits — The suicide — The headless man — Ghost-baiting — Hugh Bronte with sword and Bible — Contest in the mill — Strange surmises — The wailing child — The black horse — Grinning skull — Apparitions in Frazer's house — Chal- xvi CONTENTS PAGES lenging tlie ghost — Tne ghost's squeeze and Hugh's death — Hugh Noi-ton's account — The headless horseman — Minute description — KalyNesbit's account:^A naggin of whiskey — Captain Mayne Reid — His Texan tale — Reception in Ballynaslceagh — A practical age. CHAPTER XXIII. PATRICK BRONTES CHILDHOOD AND EARLY SUR- ROUNDINGS . ... 219 — 228 Birth — Name — Early experiences — Fed on stories — Poverty — Simple living — Dififerent kinds of bread — Sowans — Luxuries and dainties — Tea — Young Bron'e's occupation — His clothes — " Pat the Papish " — Tor- mented by Protestant lads — Blacksmith's shop— Appren- ticed to weaving — Cultivation of flax — His iisters span — The prosperous weaver — Book hunger. CHAPTER XXIV. PATRICK ERONTE's SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL- MASTERS ..... 229 — 237 A divided mind — Milton's attractions — A friend in need — The " Stickit Minister " — Education of ministers — Patiick and Harshaw — Laying plans — Bronte's edu- cation — Lights — Weaving and learning — Incessant ap- plication — overccmir g obstacles. CHAPTER XXV. LEARNING AND TEACHING . . . 238—258 The loom abandoned — Rival candidates for Glascar school — Appointed teacher to a Presbyterian school^ Precentor — Attitude of the Orangemen — Sensible system — Whipping days — Gumption in school — Success in teaching — Night-school — Amusements — English litera- CONTENTS xvii PAGES ture — The avenues of education — The Episcopal and Presbyterian ministers — Harshaw's guidance — Bronte's attainments — His reading — Books — Recreations — Ob- servations—Adventure on Mourne Mountains — Slcating — Patrick a poet — The poetry — The Vision of Hell — The characteristic pieces kept back — Palmerston and Devonshire — A love affair — A kiss and a quarrel — Dismissed from school — Harshaw's reproofs — Clandes- tine meetings — Helen faithless^Harshaw introduces him to Rector Tighe. CHAPTER XXVI. PATRICK BRONTE IN AN EPISCOPALIAN SCHOOL 259 — 26l Success in school — Private tuition — Few incidents — The Rev. Thomas Tighe — The vicar — Minutes of vestry. CHAPTER XXVn. PATRICK ERONTE AT ST. JOHN's, CAMBRIDGE 262—267 Rector Tighe's help — Harshaw still his friend — Patrick Bronte matriculates — Hare Exhibition — Duchess of Suffolk Exhibitions — Goodman Exhibition — Remember- ing his mother — Coaching at Cambiidge — Tutor and colleagues — Signature. CHAPTER XXVni. THE IRISH BRONTES AND "jANE EYRE " . 268—274 The novels first read in the Ballynaskeagh manse — Conflicting evidence — Patrick's letter to Hugh — The price paid for Cliarlotte's three novels — First editions in Ireland — Author's copies — The novels alarmed the uncles and aunts — Books shown to Mr. McICee, who admired them — Uncles pleased — Scene in the manse — McKee's verdict. CONTENTS CHAPTER XXIX. PAGES IHE AVENGER IN SEARCH OF THE REVIEWER 275 — 292 Joy of the Ii ish uncles and aunts — Mr. McCracken's testimony — Mr. McKee's evidence — Favourable reviews of Jane Eyre — Public impression — The Times — The Edinburgh Review — Blackuood's Magazine — Frazer's Magazine — Tails Magazine — Incense to the Brontes — The Quarterly Review — Effect in Ireland of the attack — McKee as comforter — The angry uncles — Hugh's vow — Preparing a shillelagh — Pickle and polish — Hugh starts for England — Arrives at Haworth on Sunday — Niece's curiosity — Hugh disappointed with his nieces — Bran- well — Prize-fight — Robin Hood's helmet at Sir W. Armitage's — Hugh leaves Haworth for London — In lodgings — At John Murray's — Saw the editor of the Review — Reviewer tried to find out who Currer Bell was — Ceased to admit Hugh at Murray's — Hugh with the publishers — A friend at the British Museum— A private dinner — Promised assistance in searching for the reviewer — Hugh's resources — Opinions of book- sellers — London explored — Return to Haworth — The vicarage gloomed — Anne's comfort and parting — A walk with Charlotte — Final parting — The mission a failure. CHAPTER XXX. WHO WROTE THE REVIEW? A WORKING HYPO- THESIS 293 308 The unsolved question — The secret safe in the house of Murray — General detestation of the reviewer — Mrs. Gaskell's opinion — Swinburne's attack — Augustine Birrell's onslaught — Interpolation in the review — Vanity Fair — Becky disposed of, and Thackeray lauded — The reviewer grows moral — Specimen of the pagan snd Pharisaic patchwork — Difference in style and sentiment — Evidence of sentiment strongest — Reviewer guilty of what he condemns — Andrew Lang's views. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE Patrick Bronte's Birthplace ..... Frontispiece General View of BrontS Neighbourhood . . . . xx Ballynaskeagh Manse, where the Novels were first read . ii The Courting Bower 93 Map of the Bronte District 107 The Bronte Home I2i Plan of the Bronte Homeland 123 The Last of the Brontes' Aunts ...... 157 Patrick Bronte 159 Charlotte Bronte 161 The Bronte Dancing Green ....... 169 The Ducking Pond . 195 The Haunted Glen . . . 211 Glascar School, where Patrick Bronte first taught . . 239 Presbyterian Meeting House, where Patrick Bronte was Precentor 255 Patrick Bronte's Matriculation Signature .... 263 Patrick Bronte's Signature on proceeding to his Degree . 266 Patrick to Hugh regarding the price paid for the Novels . 269 CHAPTER I THE HIDDEN SOURCES THE history of the Brontes resembles in a small way the history of the Nile. The great river was persistently explored, and minutely described in its meanderings through the fertile delta, and as far up, by pyramid and temple and tomb, as the explorers could go. Traveller followed traveller, each noting the discoveries of his predecessor and adding a few of his own ; but until recent years the head secret of the great African river remained shrouded in impenetrable mystery. Many guesses were hazarded as to the Egyptian phenomenon, but the muddy river continued to ebb and flow, bearing its yearly burden of fertility to Egypt no one knowing whence. Thanks to modern in- vestigation, we now know that the mysterious Nile is the natural outcome of vast lakes and other natural sources above. Explorers have seen, and we know. The current of Bronte life and thought has been faithfully traced and minutely portrayed in its 2 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND lower reaches through the fertile delta of England, but the higher reaches in Ireland have not been explored, and the head source has not been dis- closed. The sources of information regarding the Brontes within the English area have been studiously investigated, and everything known regarding that singular family has been described with great wealth of literary skill and ingenuity ; but the explorers stopped short by the English boundaries, and the eager guesses and surmises as to what lay beyond have been nearly all wrong. The Bronte phenomenon has always had fasci- nating attractions for the generous, the chivalrous, the unselfish ; but the heart of the mystery could no more be reached by investigating its English surroundings than the secrets of the Nile could be unravelled by the study of its muddy banks in Egypt. Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte is an exquisite tribute from a gifted hand laid on a sister's grave ; but Mrs. Gaskell's dreary moor- lands and dismal surroundings are as inadequate to account for the Bronte genius as the general picture of suppressed sadness is unwarranted by the Bronte letters taken as a whole, or by the living testimony of Miss Ellen Nussey, Charlotte's lifelong friend. Genius of the Bronte kind would not be so rare if grey and sombre surroundings THE HIDDEN SOURCES 3 could produce it, or if it could be stimulated by chilling repression and cramped circumstances. The Gaskell biography, however, roused curiosity as well as sympathy ; and while the reader felt keenly for the desolate girls in the Yorkshire vicarage, he also felt that the whole story had not been told : hence the number of attempts by many hands to complete a biography which all felt to be only a fragment. Mr. Wemyss Reid has given us a picture of the Brontes in brighter and truer colours, taken from the very same material in which Mrs. Gaskell found her sombre tints ; but Mr. Wemyss Reid's theory as to the " disillusioning " of Charlotte at Brussels is a pure assumption, repudiated with indignation by Miss Nussey, Charlotte's confidante, unwarranted by the correspondence, and quite in- capable of supporting the structure which Mr. Wemyss Reid would build upon it. If Charlotte's genius required a love-disaster to quicken it, how shall we account for the kindling of Emily's genius — especially as Emily's simple heart was never ruffled by a love affair, and as the author of Wuthering Heights is admitted to be the most Bronte of all the gifted family ? Or how did it happen that the gentle Anne was moved to tell the story of Agnes Grey ? Mr. Wemyss Reid's story stops short on English soil, and leaves the reader with an anxious desire to know more. 4 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND The Bronte problem attracted Mr. Augustine Birrell, and his brilliant Life of Charlotte Bronte contains some additional facts gleaned in England. The sketch is full of humour and pathos, and deserves to be read if only for the generous indig- nation called forth by the Quarterly reviewer who sought to assassinate the reputation of the author of Jane Eyre. But Mr. Birrell's sarcasm with regard to the Irish Brontes loses point when he is found to be simply following the mistakes of his predecessors. Similar excellencies and defects mark the numerous books which have been written on the Brontes. We want more than intense enthusiasm, painstaking investigation, high appreciation, with only a few guesses thrown in where facts are needed. The builders of the Bronte fame have done their best on an Egyptian model, but the bricks used have been wanting in the Irish straw that would have given them cohesion, and hence the various structures are lacking in the elements of stability and thoroughness. This feeling of dissatisfaction was felt in some degree by the writers themselves, but by none more clearly expressed than by Mr. J. A. Erskine Stuart, the author of a most useful book. The Bronte Country. After tracing the Brontes in England and Ireland as far as their footsteps were known, Mr. Erskine Stuart adds : — THE HIDDEN SOURCES 5 " For our own part, we desire a fuller biography of the family than has yet been written, and we trust, and are confident, that such will yet appear, and that there are many surprises yet in store for students of this Celtic circle."* I now proceed, but not without misgivings, to justify the confidence expressed by Mr. Erskine Stuart, and to fulfil the prediction implied so far as regards the Brontes in Ireland. * The Bronte Country, by J. A. Erskine Stuart (Long- mans, Green & Co.), p. 192. CHAPTER II THE CHIEF SOURCES OF INFORMATION: PRELIMINARY I PROPOSE in the following pages to supply the Irish straws of Bronte history which I have been accumulating for more than a quarter of a century, and to lift the curtain that conceals the origin of the family and the source of their genius. I have waited in hopes that some more skilful hand might undertake the task ; but as no one else, since the death of Captain Mayne Reid, has the requisite information, the story of the Irish Brontes must be told by me, or remain untold. I have had exceptional advantages for under- taking the ta.sk. When a child I came into contact with the Irish Brontes, and even then I was startled by their genius, before any literary work had made their name famous in England. My first nurse had lived within a quarter of a mile of their home, and had a rich store of wild talcs regarding them. 6 THE CHIEF SOURCES OF INFORMATION ^ My first classical teacher was the Rev. William McAllister of Finard, near Newry. As a child he had known Patrick Bronte, and he had often heard his father Hugh, the grandfather of Charlotte, nar- rate to a spellbound audience the incidents which formed the groundwork of Wuthering Heights. Mr. McAllister was a good teacher, though he taught me more of Bronte lore than of classic minutia;. He aimed more at interesting his pupils in the story of Troy than at grounding them in the niceties of Greek grammar ; for he held that classics should be taught with the simple view of making the learner more proficient in the use of his own language. He declared classical learning to be useful only in so far as it enriched the mind with new thoughts, and gave a larger wealth of vocabulary to the tongue. He taught me to reproduce the classic stories in English rather than to make translations ; and sometimes he would give me the plot of such works as the Hecuba or the Alcestis, and leave me to fill in the wording in my own way. In accordance with his theory, he often varied my task by giving me one of Hugh Bronte's stories to reproduce. He used to take me for long walks through the fields, and tell me the story of Hugh Bronte's early life, or some of his other stories, which he assured me were just as striking and as worthy to be recounted as the wrath of Achilles or the wanderings of Pius .^neas. These stories I would reproduce, some- 8 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND times in writing, but oftener vivd voce, with as much spirit as possible, dulness being the one qualit)' that my tutor would not tolerate. It thus happened that I wrote screeds of the Bronte novels before a line of them had been penned at Haworth ; and I do not think Bran- well Bronte meant to deceive when he spoke of writing Wuthering Heights, for the story in outline must have been common property at Haworth, as it was largely the story of Grand- father Bronte, and the children of the vicarage were all scribblers. However that may have been, I read the Bronte novels with the feeling that I had already known what was coming, and I was chiefly interested in the wording and skilful manipulation of details, for I had become ac* quainted with the incidents of old Bronte's career, as well as with most of his stories, real and imaginary. My teacher's relatives lived quite close to the Brontes. They were freeholders and local gentry in a small way, and through them I was able to verify facts and incidents which had come to me somewhat distorted, and rather artistic, through the medium of my teacher's brilliant imagination. The pains then taken to have the facts in their right proportion and setting have fixed them indelibly on my. mind. Besides these there were two brothers, John and THE CHIEF SOURCES OF INFORMATION 9 James Todd, with whom I was acquainted, who knew the Brontes, and were brimful of their doings. At a later period I had still better opportunities for forming a sound judgment regarding the Irish Brontes. The pleasantest parts of my under- graduate holidays were spent at the manse of the Rev. David McKee of Ballynaskeagh. Mr. McKee was a great educationalist. He was the instructor and friend of several hundred students, whom he prepared for college. Many of these afterwards occupied prominent places in the Church and at the Bar, and one of them, Captain Mayne Reid, dedicated The White Chief to his old teacher. Mr. McKee not only gave a sound education to his pupils, but he had the power of inspiring almost every one of them with something of his own high moral purpose and chivalric tone. He was the author of several books, one of which led to the commencement in Ireland of the tem- perance movement, which afterwards spread to Scotland and England. It was a common saying of his pupils that, had he lived with more favourable surroundings, he would have enriched the world with thoughts as brilliant as Carlyle's, but without Carlyle's bile. This great and noble man, who stood six feet four inches high, was the friend of the Brontes, who were his near neighbours. He recognised the 10 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND Bronte genius where others only saw what was wild and unconventional. The Brontes came to Mr. McKee, as did all his neighbours, for help, sympathy, and guidance ; and the first house in Ireland in which the Bronte novels were read was the Ballynaskeagh manse. Mr. McKee's home was the centre of mental activity in that neighbourhood, and the early copies of the novels that came to the "Uncle Brontes" were cut, read, and criticised by Mr, McKee, and his criticisms were forwarded to the nieces in Haworth. Great was the joy of the Bronte uncles and aunts when Mr. McKee's approval was given to the works of their nieces. The arrival oi Jane Eyre was an event of some importance. It was brought to the manse by Hugh Bronte before any notice of it had appeared. He handed it over to the great man with a doubtful air (of which more hereafter), as if it were the evidence of a youthful indiscretion on the part of his niece Charlotte. That novel was read en famille, and sober work was suspended till it was finished. When the last word was read and all rose to disperse, Mr. McKee said, " That is the greatest novel that has been written in my time ; but it is Bronte all over, from beginning to end." It thus happened that I had opportunities of becoming acquainted with the BrontSs under the ■■ sV-X..-iV ■ THE CHIEF SOURCES OF INFORMATION 13 most favourable circumstances. Besides these, several others who knew the Brontes, some of them still living, have kindly communicated to me the information they possessed, so that I have had side lights from many points on the many-sided Bronte phenomenon. I have thought it right to give these personal details in this place, not only to show the qualifi- cations I have for undertaking the story of the Brontes in Ireland, but more especially that I may not be obliged to interrupt my narrative by quoting authorities as I proceed, or by explaining how I came by my information. I have spared no pains to make my narrative as complete as possible, although several characteristic stories will have to be omitted. During my undergraduate days I once spent a couple of months in the south of Ireland dressed as a peasant, trying to trace some of the Bronte traditions to their sources. I have since made long journeys with a view to reconciling points that were at variance, and even during late years I have gone many times to Ireland to clear up, if possible, small matters that did not seem consistent with the main facts. I do not even now pretend to have reached absolute accuracy on every point referred to in the following pages, but the statements are as close approximations to fact as they can be made by patient industry ; and as I cannot hope for fresh 14 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND light on matters still obscure, I do not see that anything would be gained by further delay. I therefore submit this history of the BrontSs in Ireland to the generous consideration of those who can discern that I have done my best with a difficult and complicated subject CHAPTER III GRANDFATHER BRONTE'S EARLY HOME HUGH BRONTE, the father of Patrick and grandfather of the famous novelists, first makes his appearance as if he had stepped out of a Bronte novel. His early experiences qualified him to take a permanent place* beside the child Jane Eyre at Mrs. Reed's. The treatment that embittered his childhood is never referred to by the granddaughters in their correspondence ; but it is quite evident that the knowledge of his hardships dominated their minds and gave a bent to their imaginations when depicting the misery of young lives dependent on charity. Story-telling, as we shall see, was a hereditary gift in the Bronte family, and Patrick inherited it from his father. Charlotte's friend, Miss Ellen Nussey, has often told me of the marvellous fascination with which the girls would hang on their father's lips as he depicted scene after scene of some tragic story in glowing words and with harrowing details. The breakfast would remain '5 i6 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND untouched till the story had passed the crisis, and sometimes the narration became so real and vivid and intense that the listeners begged the vicar to proceed no farther. Sleepless nights succeeded story-telling evenings at the vicarage. Hugh Bronte, according to his own account, be- longed to a large family of brothers and sisters. His father lived somewhere in the south of Ireland. He was a man in prosperous circumstances, and Hugh's early childhood was spent in a comfortable home. Some time about the middle of last century, or a little earlier, the family was thrown into excitement by the arrival of an uncle and aunt of whom they had never heard. The children at first thought the new-comers very rude and common, and they did not like the uncle's swarthy complexion and dark glancing eyes ; but as they remained guests for a consider- able time, first impressions wore off. Hugh believed he was then about five or six years old. He soon became a great favourite with the new-comers, who took him with them wherever they went and had him to sleep with them at night. The child was their constant companion. They bought him little things that pleased him, and when they had completely won his heart they proposed to him that, as they had no children of their own, he should go home with them and be their son. GRANDFATHER BRONTE'S EARLY HOME 17 Hugh believed, in later life, that the whole matter had already been arranged between his father and uncle, but that the uncle was allowed time to over- come the bad impression produced by his sinister looks, and to carry out the matter in his own way. This he did by holding out visions of ponies, and carriages, and dogs, and guns, and fishing-rods, until the child's imagination was on fire, and he pleaded with his father to let him go with his uncle. Consent was given, and paradise, unguarded by cherubim or flaming sword, lay open before the child. He longed for the day when he might begin to spend his life among ponies and dogs, and ramble through orchards and among flowers, and fish for trout in the river Boyne, and be a great scholar (for that was part of the programme), with his good uncle and aunt approving, and his brothers and sisters coming often to see him in his glory and enjoy the fun. The day, or rather the night, came soon enough — a night to be remembered. Many years later the old man, then beeking a corn-kiln in County Down, used to tell on winter nights the story of his early life, but he never failed to dwell on the simple incidents of that night. He had waited with impatience the arrival of a local dressmaker, who brought him late at night a special suit of clothes to travel in. When the clothes were fitted on he was raised on a chair to l8 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND give the dressmaker the beverage of them. - The first kiss in new clothes in Ireland is a special favour. It is called "the beverage," and is sup- posed to confer good luck. Hugh's sisters thronged round him for "second beverage," but the kiss and squeeze of the dress- maker remained a lifelong memory. He always believed that she had a presentiment of the fate that awaited him, for her voice choked and her eyes filled with tears as she turned away from him. Standing on the chair he received the last adieux of his numerous brothers and sister.s. His mother, who never seemed happy about his going away, but whose opposition was always borne down, did not appear for the parting farewell. For the previous few days she had been accustomed to take him into her lap, and with eyes full of tears heap endearing epithets upon him, such as " My sweet flower " ; but he always broke away from her not being in a mood to appreciate sympathy. His father lifted him in his arms and carried him out into the darkness, and placed him gently between his uncle and aunt on a seat with a raised back, which was laid across a cart from side to side. Sitting aloft on the cross-seat of the vehicle, the prototype of the Irish gig, little Hugh Bronte, with heart full of childish anticipations, began his rough journey out into the big world. CHAPTER IV THE FOUNDLING AND FOSTER-FRIENDS WE must now leave little Hugh Bronte with his new friends until we have a fuller acquaintance with the uncle to whom he has been committed. Hugh Bronte's father, the g*eat-great- grandfather of the novelists, used to live in a farm on the banks of the Boyne, somewhere above Drogheda. Besides being a farmer he was a cattle-dealer, and he often crossed from Drogheda to Liverpool to dispose of his cattle. On one of his return journeys from Liverpool a strange child was found in a bundle in the hold of the vessel. It was very young, very black, very dirty, and almost without clothing of any kind. No one on board knew whence it had come, and no one seemed to care what became of it. There was no doctor in the ship, and no woman except Mrs. Bronte, who had accompanied her husband to Liverpool. The child was thrown on the deck. Some one said, " Toss it overboard " ; but no one would touch 3 19 20 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND it, and its cries were distressing. P'rom sheer pity Mrs. Bronte was obliged to succour the abandoned infant. On reaching Drogheda it was taken ashore for food and clothing, with the intention of sending it back to Liverpool ; but the captain would not allow it to be brought aboard his ship again. There was no foundling hospital nearer than Dublin ; and in those days Dublin was far from Drogheda. There was a vestry tax at that time for the carriage of illegitimate children to foundling hospitals, but as no one in Drogheda had an interest in the child being removed, it was left in Mrs. Bronte's hands, and she found it much easier to take it home than to carry it to Dublin, where it might possibly have been refused admission among the authorised foundlings. The Brontes even at that early period were of a golden hue, and they exceedingly disliked the swarthy infant ; but " pity melts the heart to love," and Mrs. Bronte brought it up among her own children. When the little foundling was carried up out of the hold of the vessel, it was supposed to be a Welsh child on account of its colour. It might doubtless have laid claim to a moi'e Oriental descent, but when it became a member of the Bronte family they called it " Welsh." Little Welsh was a weak, delicate, and fretful thing, and being despised for his colour and origin, THE FOUNDLING AND FOSTER-FRIENDS 21 and generally pushed aside by the vigorous young Brontes, he grew up morose, envious, and cunning. He used secretly to break the toys, destroy the flower-beds, kill the birds, and stealthily play so many spiteful tricks on the children that he was continually receiving chastisement at their hands. For though they seldom caught him in the monkeyisli acts of which he was accused, they attributed all the mischief to him, and detested and punished him accordingly. On his part he main- tained a moody, sullen silence, only broken when Mr. Bronte was present to protect him. He became a favourite with Mr. Bronte, partly because he was weak and needed his protection, and partly because he always came running to meet him on his return home, as if he were glad to see him and anxious to render him any assistance in his power. He followed his master about while at home with dog-like fidelity, and he generally managed to tell him everything he knew to the other children's disadvantage. He thus succeeded in securing a permanent place between the children and their father. Old Bronte took Welsh with him to fairs and markets, instead of his own sons, as soon as he was able to go, and he found him of the greatest service. His very insignificance added to his usefulness. He would mingle with the people from whom Bronte wished to purchase cattle, find out from 22 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND their conversation among themselves the lowest price they would be willing to take, and report to his master. Bronte would then go to the dealers, and without the usual weary process of bargaining offer them straight off a little less than he knew they wanted, and secure the cattle. In Liverpool also Welsh would mingle with the buyers, who no more suspected his business than they suspected the street dog, and spoke freely what Welsh had come to hear. Bronte became a rich and prosperous dealer, and Welsh became indispensable to him, and followed him like his shadow by day, and at night was to be found coiled up beside him like his dog ; but the more Bronte became attached to Welsh the more his children despised and hated the interloper. As time passed Bronte's affairs passed more and more into the hands of his assistant, until at last he had almost the entire management. They were returning from Liverpool after selling the largest drove of cattle that had ever crossed the Channel, when suddenly Bronte died on board. Welsh, who was with him at the time of his death, professed to know nothing of his master's money, and as all books and accounts had been made away with, no one could tell what had become of the cash received for the cattle. The young Brontes, who were now almost men and women, had been brought up in comparative THE FOUNDLING AND FOSTER-FRIENDS 23 luxury. Their wants had always been supplied from their father's purse, they knew not how. They were well educated, and had been a good deal in England ; but they neither understood farming nor dealing, and besides the capital employed in dealing had been lost, and the land so neglected that it was not in a condition to support a family, even if the requisite capital and skill for its cultivation had been forthcoming. In this emergency Welsh requested an interview with the brothers and sisters together. He declared that he had a proposal to make that would restore the fallen fortunes of the family. He had been forbidden the house ; but as it was supposed he was going to give back the money which he must have stolen, his request was reluctantly acceded to. At the interview Welsh appeared dressed up as he had never been seen before. He was arrayed in broadcloth, black and shiny as his well-greased hair, and in fine linen, white and glistening as his prominent teeth. The upholstering must have been costly, but the effect was ludicrous to those who had known the man all their lives. The sinister look was intensified by a smile of satis- faction that gave prominence at once to the cast in both eyes and to the jackal-like dentals. When all were assembled he began at once in the grand cattle-dealer style to express sympathy 24 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND with the family, and to declare that on one condition he would carry on the dealing, and supply the wants of the family, as if nothing had happened. The condition was that the youngest sister, Mary, should become his wife. The pro- posal was rejected with a great outburst of indignant scorn. Many hot and bitter words were exchanged ; but as Welsh was leaving the house he turned and said, " Mary shall yet be my wife, and I will scatter the rest of you like chaff from this house, which shall be my home." With these words he passed out into the darkness. The interview had two immediate results : it revealed to the brothers the dangers that threatened them, and roused them to an earnest effort to save their home. Welsh had shown his hand, and must be thwarted. He had robbed them, but he must not be permitted to ruin and disgrace them. That his cunning and malignity might be harmless the boys must bend their necks to the yoke of labour. They had many friends, and in a short time the three brothers were employed in remunera- tive occupations, two of them in England and one in Ireland. They were able to send home enough to pay the rent of the farm and to maintain their mother and sisters in comfort. But Welsh was also roused to gain his end, and it was certain he would not scruple to use any means by which he might carry out his THE FOUNDLING AND FOSTER-FRIENDS 25 purpose. He did not return to the cattle-dealing, for which by himself he knew he had no skill ; but he soon found a post from which he hoped to avenge past indignities and gratify his greed and lust. The landlord of Bronte's farm was an " absentee." The estate was administered by an agent. He was the great man of the district — local magistrate, grand juror, and pasha in general. His real business was the collection of rent, and for this purpose a parliament of landlords had given him despotic powers, absolute and irresponsible in matters of property, limb, and life. The agent was served by attorneys, bailiffs, and sub-agents, the Bashi-bazouks of those days. One of the offices of sub-agent was open, and Welsh was appointed to it in return for a large bribe paid to the agent. The business of the sub-agent was to act as buffer betweei) the tenant and the " squire," as the agent was always called. The sub-agent was generally a man without heart, conscience, or bowels, selected from the basest of the people. Like the genuine Bashi-bazouk, he had nominal wages, never paid and never demanded; but he was generally able to squeeze a good deal out of the tenants, first by alarming them, and then by promising to stand their friend with the " rapacious agent." 26 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND The sub-agent exaggerated his influence with the squire, before whom he cringed and grovelled ; but at the same time he was the chief medium through which the agent knew the condition of the tenants and their ability to pay their rent One of his duties was to mix with the people in their festivities, when whiskey had opened their hearts and loosened their tongues, and discover if they had any hidden resources from which they might be able to pay an increased rent Welsh's former practices among cattle-dealers, as well as his natural disposition, gave him great advantages in carrying out to his agent's satis- faction this part of his duty. He was the very man for the post of sub-agent He had lived by cunning and served with treachery, and in his new occupation he had great scope for serving himself as well as his master. He was a man of great importance when dealing with the tenants, and seldom saw them without letting drop the fatal word "eviction." He was ever arrogant to the poor on the estate, whom he could have served, and cringing to the rich, who could serve him. He was a born sub-agent, and circumstances had favoured his development. But Welsh, while serving the squire, and recoup- ing himself off the tenants for the bribe he had paid him, never for a moment forgot that he had sought the office of sub-agent for the double pur- THE FOUNDLING AND FOSTER-FRIENDS 27 pose of getting hold of his late master's farm and with it the person of Mary Bronte. He at once drew the agent's attention to the derelict condition of the farm, and to the likelihood of the rent falling into arrears, and in the interest of the estate declared himself willing to undertake the burden of his late master's desolate homestead. He could not bear to see the family rudely evicted, or the place to pass into the occupation of strangers 1 The agent promised that the farm should be transferred to Welsh on payment of a certain sum in case the Brontes were unable to pay the rent ; but the rent did not fall into arrears. On the contrary, the agent's demands were regularly and punctually met, and besides considerable sums of money were spent in decorating the house and improving the land. Welsh pointed out to the agent that the Brontes were earning good wages in England, and the rent was accordingly raised ; but the increased rent was paid on the day it fell due, and again raised in consequence. Welsh, finding himself foiled in his short cut to his master's homestead, and considering that in future he might have to pay the increased rent himself, resolved to change his tactics, and turn his attention to the other object of his quest, Mary Bronte. In the neighbourhood there lived a female sub- 28 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND agent called Meg, as base and unprincipled as himself. Her chief duty was the secret removal of illegitimate children to the foundling hospital in Dublin. Her services were utilised in many ways. She was useful in conveying bottles of whiskey to farmers' wives who were getting into drinking habits, and in aiding farmers' sons and daughters to dispose of eggs and apples and meal purloined from their parents, in return for trinkets and ornaments which they wished to possess. She had also great skill in furthering the wicked designs of rich but immoral men. She was the spey- woman, who used to tell the fortunes of servant- girls and lure them to their destruction. Like the male sub-agents, such women were generally supposed to possess the black art, and to have sold themselves to the devil. Welsh employed this vile harpy to be his go- between with Mary. She was tcffisay that he loved her to distraction ; that he was dying to speak to her ; that he was now passing rich, and in great favour with the landlord, who was likely soon to make him chief agent ; that he would be local magis- trate, grand juror, and, in fact, magnate and squire of the district. In support of these forecasts Welsh used to drive past the Brontes' house in a carriage borrowed for the occasion from a gentleman-farmer whose rent was in arrears. The spey-woman came often to tell the servants' THE FOUNDLING AND FOSTER-FRIENDS 29 fortunes, and she had many opportunities of telling Mary of Welsh's love and goodness. She told how for several years he had restrained the agent by his entreaties from evicting them from their home, and that he had yearly paid large sums to the agent to prevent him from carrying out his designs. All this seemed incredible to the simple-minded girl, but the harpy was able to show the receipts for the money on the same official form in which they were accustomed to receive the receipts for their rent. After a time Mary listened to the vile woman's tales. Welsh could not be so bad as they believed him to be ! Flowers taken from the gardens of tenants found their way in great profusion to Mary's room. Trinkets wrung from anguish- stricken tenants in fear of eviction were laid on Mary's dressing-table, for the servants had been drawn into the conspiracy. At length Mary agreed to meet Welsh in a lone plantation on the farm, in company with the harpy, that she might express to him her gratitude for protecting the dear old home. That meeting sealed Mary's fate. She felt she could never again look any decent man in the face, so she consented to marrjr Welsh to cover her shame. The marriage was secretly performed by one of the buckle-beggars of the time, and then publicly proclaimed. Welsh was now the husband of one of the ladies on the farm, and 30 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND for a substantial fine the agent accepted him as tenant. The brothers, on hearing the news, which travelled slowly in those days, hurried back to the old home, but arrived too late. The agent received them with great courtesy. They reminded him that their ancestors had re- claimed the place from mere bog and wilderness ; that their father had expended several thousand pounds on building the houses and draining the land ; that even within the last few years they themselves had expended large sums on the place, and had submitted to several raisings of the rent without demur ; and that now their old home with all these improvements had been confiscated with- out cause or notice, and handed over to the man who had robbed and degraded the family. The agent seemed greatly pained. He was very sorry for the family, but of course he was only an agent, and obliged to do whatever the landlord desired, however unreasonable he might in his private capacity consider the landlord's views. Everybody knew that the landlord was a resolute man, and he could hold out no hope of being able to pre^-ail on him to change his determination. Failing to get redress from the agent, the brothers unfortunately took the law into their own hands, and were arrested for trespass and assault. They were tried before the agent, who, with unruffled THE FOUNDLING AND FOSTER-FRIENDS 31 courtesy and sympathetic demeanour, sent them to prison and hard labour. He spoke of the pain with which he was obliged to vindicate " law and order," and gently reproached them for their lack of gratitude to the chivalrous gentleman who had relieved them of the burden of a neglected farm and made it a home for their penniless sisters. Thus the man Welsh, who afterwards assumed the name Bronte, carried out his purpose of possessing his late master's farm and with it the person of his youngest daughter. His threat of vengeance was also carried out — mother, sisters, brothers were scattered abroad, and so effectively that I have not been able, after much seai'ching, to find a single trace of them. This sordid transaction, which was an ordinary affair in Ireland, was fraught with far-reaching consequences to landlordism. It gave birth to a tenant-right theory, of which we shall hear something in a subsequent chapter. CHAPTER V THE ADOPTION AND OATH WE must now return to little Hugh Bronte, whom we last saw passing out into the darkness from his father's house, seated between his uncle and aunt. In Hugh's newly discovered relatives we recognise Welsh and Mary Bronte. Many years had passed since the events recorded in the last chapter. The agent there referred to had fallen by the hand of an assassin after a bout of heartless evictions, and almost simultaneously the house from which the Brontes had been driven was burnt to the ground, and all Welsh's ill-gotten riches perished in the conflagration. He was left a poor and ruined man, unable to propitiate the newly appointed agent with a satisfactory bribe, and hence he had to relinquish the sub-agency so congenial to his tastes. Welsh was always able to subordinate his pride to his interests, and through his wife he succeeded in opening correspondence with one of her brothers, a prosperous man settled in Ireland. 32 THE ADOPTION AND OATH 33 Welsh expressed deep penitence for all the wrongs he had inflicted on the family, and declared his earnest desire, if forgiven, to make amends. He and Mary were then childless. They were getting on in years, and they professed to be troubled at the prospect of the farm, for lack of an heir, passing to strangers. They offered to adopt one of their numerous nephews, and to bring him up as their own son. Conditions of adoption were agreed on, including such matters as education ; but the chief item was a solemn oath, by which the father agreed never to visit or communicate with his son in any way, and Welsh and Mary Bronte bound themselves on their part never to let the child know where his father lived. The family oath in Ireland was regarded with superstitious awe, and bound like destiny. Few of the peasantry ever considered official oaths in law courts binding. With them the formal kissing of the Book, at the command of a brusque and contemptuous official, had none of the sanctions of religion, superstition, or justice. The court oath had come to be recognised as simply a screw in the wheel of the oppressor. But the family covenant was a different instrument, and the man who broke it was perjured and abandoned beyond all hope of salvation here or hereafter. The infringement of the sacred oath shut for ever the gates of mercy. 34 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND The Bronte covenant was faithfully kept, and even when Mary visited Hugh in County Down, some time about the beginning of this centuiy, she could neither be coaxed nor compelled to give him either directly or indirectly a clue or hint by which he might discover the home of his childhood. It thus happened that Hugh Bronte was never able to retrace his steps to his father's house after the darkness closed around him, perched aloft on the cross-seat of a country cart between his uncle and aunt. CHAPTER VI A FEARFUL JOURNEY IT was a cold night, and the child, coming from the bright and warm house, crept close under his aunt's wing for warmth. Soon the little full heart overflowed, and he began to prattle in his childish way, as he had done with his new friends for several days. Suddenly a harsh torrent of corrosive words burst from Welsh, commanding him to stop gabbling and not to let another sound pass his lips. For a moment the child was stunned and bewildered. He had never heard any words escape his uncle's lips except words of kindness and approval, but the fierce stern violence of the angry order fell like a blow. The young Bronte blood could not, however, rest passively in such a crisis. Hugh, disentangling himself from his aunt's shawl, drew towards his uncle and said, " Did you speak those unkind words to me ? " " I'll teach you to disobey me, you magnificent whelp ! " rasped out Welsh, and suiting the action 4 35 36 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND to the word brought his great hand down with a sharp smack on the little fellow's face. Hurt and angry, little Bronte sprang from the seat into the bottom of the cart, and facing the cruel uncle shouted, " I won't go with you one step farther ! I will go back and tell my father what a bad old monster you are." And then, clutching at the reins, he screamed, " Turn the horse round and take me home ! " He saw the lights of home shining out warm into the darkness, but he felt a heavy hand grasping him and choking the voice out of him. Light flashed from his eyes, and he felt blood flowing from his nose, and he was conscious that he was being shaken and knocked against the bottom and sides of the cart, and sworn at, and that he was neither able to escape nor to speak. Several hours later he woke up, and found him- self lying in damp straw at the back end of the cart, behind the seat on which his uncle and aunt were riding. He felt sick and sore and hungry. He" had been dreaming that he was attacked by a fierce, wild monster ; but his father had come and slain the monster and saved him, and he lay awake listening for his father's footsteps and voice. He waited long, but his father did not come. Every jolt of the springless cart pained him, as there was little straw between him and the bare boards. It was a moonlight night, with occasional showers. He watched the watery moon racing behind the A FEARFUL JOURNEY 37 clouds, and the stars following in the same head- long career, sometimes hiding behind dark masses, and again shooting brightly and freely across open spaces. He had never seen the sky look so strange. He had always known things as friendly to him. He loved to look up at night, and he had always thought that the heavens smiled lovingly back on him ; but on that night he perceived that the cloud racks and careering stars were selfishly following their own courses and cared nothing for him. He turned on his side and watched the two figures on the seat above him, riding along side by side in silence and caring nothing for him. A few hours before he had loved them with all the romantic and passionate love of his young heart. Now the whole current was changed, and he hated them to loathing. He felt the utter desolation of loneliness. His thoughts rushed home as he remembered the comforts and kindness he had left behind, and believed then, child though he was, that he had lost that home for ever. He had tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge that night, and had grown in experience of good and evil. That was the first night he ever remembered on which he had neglected to say his prayers. His mother had taught him to pray, and when he prayed he believed that God heard him and took care of him in the darkness. Was it because he had forgotten to say his prayers that God had left 38 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND him alone with the unsympathising moon and stars, and with the cruel man and woman who had him at their mercy ? He rose to his knees, put up his little folded hands, and said the prayer by which children come to their heavenly Father — the only prayer he knew. When he came to the words, " Bless father and mother, and my good uncle and aunt," he felt the unsuitableness of his simple liturgy for his present need ; " good uncle and aunt " stuck in his throat, and he could not proceed. He was seized with great terror lest he had spoiled his prayer, and he wondered what would come of it, if God did not hear it. While he was perplexed with this thought the black cloud of scepticism for the first time darkened his little mind and obscured his simple faith, and he feared that God would not hear him. And then the forlorn and desolate child slid a little lower on the down grade, .and the awful doubt came to him, he knew not whence, that perhaps there was no God at all, and in his distress he sobbed out, " O God, if there be a God, let me die ! " The sobbing sound startled the uncle. He turned suddenly round, and with his whip struck the kneeling child and prostrated him. Little Hugh did not see the blow coming, and for an instant he thought God had answered his prayer and killed him ; but the blow was followed by A FEARFUL JOURNEY 39 a hurricane of oaths and threats which left no doubt that it came from his uncle. The child was badly hurt. The weal raised by the whip burned like a cord of fire. He did not cry, however. The philosophy of patient, passive resistance grew up in him, and he would not let his bad uncle know that he was suffering from the blow. Seventy years after that night* Hugh Bronte used to tell the story with great vividness, dwelling on his own feelings in their sequence, and in repeating the narrative he scarcely ever forgot a sentence or varied a word. He would say, " I grew fast that night : I was Christian child, ardent lover, vindictive hater, enthusiast, misanthrope, sceptic, atheist, and philosopher in one cruel hour. Undeserved blows from a hand we once loved fall heavy, and lead to many thoughts." The child's mind was filled with a great tumult of feelings. His atheism was merely a spasm of the heart, and as he lay on the straw he wondered if God would let him die, and then, like a true Bronte, he prayed that his life might be spared until he should be avenged on his inhuman uncle. Then he was a child again. His mother's form rose up before him ; he remembered how he had prayed at her knee, and slept safely. He remem- bered also the sad eyes which she had bent upon him during the past few days, and the sweet and 40 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND gentle manner in which she had caressed him, and, while his thoughts were thus occupied, he imagined that he was again safe on her lap, and slept. When he awoke it was broad day. He lay perfectly still, and heard an altercation going on between Welsh and his wife about fifty pounds. He did not then fully understand the subject of the quarrel, but he learned afterwards that Welsh expected Mary to prevail on her brother to pay £1^0 per annum in return for Hugh's prospects and bringing up. The bitter wrangle closed by Welsh declaring he would murder both his wife and nephew and throw them into the river. Long silence followed this announcement, and then they began to pass a bottle of whiskey between them. Noticing that Hugh was awake, they passed it to him and ordered him to drink. He was thirsty, and put the bottle to his lips, but could not drink ; he had never tasted whiskey before, and it burnt him. His uncle, in taking back the bottle from him, spoke savagely, but did not strike him. After a while he sat up in the straw and looked over the sides of the cart. He was in a strange and unknown land. On the west rose a mountain abloom with heather. The rising sun shone upon it, and gave a golden tint to the ruby heath. On the east, bordered by the sea, stretched a level A FEARFUL JOURNEY 41 plain composed of barren bog and rocky scrub- land. The morning sky was perfectly unclouded, and the sun, which had just risen out of a blood- red sea, was touching with silver the dewy grass and wet stones and gossamer cobwebs on the bushes. There was no sign of human being within sight. Crows flew overhead, wheat-ears on the rocks flashed their white-ringed tails, hawks poised in the air over their prey ; but the land was desolate, and even the track on which the cart jogged heavily along could scarcely be called a road. As the wheels jolted from hole to hole the child felt his whole frame shaken almost to pieces. He was hungry and cold and in pain, but he was glad that God did not take him at his word and let him die in the darkness. Then he remembered the loving home that was receding farther and farther from him, and having repeated the simple prayer that his mother had taught him to say every morning, the weary, home-sick child sobbed himself again to sleep. When he awoke the sun was shining hot in his face. He was alone in the cart, out of which the horse had been taken. At first his alarm was great, as he found he had been deserted by the people from whom he longed to escape ; but he found his aunt's heavy shawl spread over him, and he knew that she could not be very far away. The cart had been drawn up close to a little 42 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND thatched cottage, which comprised under the same roof a grocer's shop and a public-house. He saw a loaf in the window and some apples, and he tried to get out of the cart, but was unable to do so. A blacksmith, whose smithy stood on the other side of the road, seeing his fruitless efforts, came to him and lifted him down ; and just as he was beginning hurriedly to tell the blacksmith the story of his wrongs, his aunt, who had approached him from behind, caught his arm and led him gently into the cottage. He had there some potatoes and buttermilk, and slept on a settle bed by the kitchen fire till late in the afternoon. He had not been permitted to speak to any one, and no one had spoken to him. He was still dreaming of home when he was roughly pulled off the bed and told to mount the cart again. Heavy imprecations fell on his aunt, who detained him a little to wash the blood-stains off his face and make him ready to continue the journey. A penny bap was put into his hand, and he was allowed to buy apples with the few pence that had been put by his brothers and sisters into the pockets of his new clothes as hansel. " It was ten years," said old Bronte, " before I fingered another penny that I could call my own." The bright promise of the morning was not fulfilled. As the shades of evening began to gather the journey was continued in a drizzling rain. A A FEARFUL JOURNEY 43 bottle of fresh straw had been added to the hard bed on which little Hugh was to spend the night. Adapting himself to his circumstances, he arranged the straw under the cross-seat on which his uncle and aunt sat, so as to be sheltered from the rain. Then, placing his h-eap of apples and the bap beside him, he settled down in comparative comfort for the night, so soon does the human animal accom- modate itself to its surroundings. On the coast of Syria I once arranged with a ragged, rascally-looking Arab for a row in his boat. My companion was a Scotch Hebrew professor. It was a balmy afternoon, and we enjoyed and pro- tracted our outing. We talked a little to our Arab in Arabic, and much about him of a not very complimentary character in our own tongue. I happened to drop some sympathetic words re- garding the poor wretch, and suddenly his tongue became loosed in broad Scotch, and he told us his story. It was very simple. Twenty years before, the English ship on which he served as a lad had been wrecked at Alex- andretta, on the northern coast of Syria. He swam ashore, lived among the people of the coast till he had become one of themselves, and at the time we met him he was the husband of a common Arab woman and the father of a dusky progeny. He was content with his squalid existence, and never again wished to see his native heather. 44 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND I knew a lady in the Syrian desert, the devoted wife of a petty Arabian sheikh. She drew her blood from the bluest strain in England. She had gone down to dinner in the Palace on the arm of Wellington, and had been considered the belle and beauty of the Court. She had been wife to an English Lord Chancellor, a great Governor- general of India, and had moved in the highest rank of the society of her time. But she was content and happy to endure the privations of Bedawi life, and isolation from civilising influences, for the society of a husband who was not very clean or kind. Comparing small things with great, we need not wonder, then, when we see little Hugh Bronte arranging his straw divan, and settling down soberly beside his frugal repast. His couch was his castle for the time. The night was long, the rain was incessant ; the horse stumbled and splashed through the mud, and the harsh uncle varied the monotony by some- times whipping the horse into a trot, and then swearing at it when it did trot. By ten o'clock the next morning a large village was reached ; but Hugh Bronte in after-years was never able to identify it, nor have I been able to conjecture after much searching its probable position. In the village there was an inn of considerable importance. The child was carried stiff and cold A FEARFUL JOURNEY 45 from the cart to a little room in the inn, in which he was put to bed. No one but his aunt had been allowed to come near him. After placing some bread and milk' beside him, she took away his clothes and locked the door of the little room. In the afternoon she returned, bringing with her a suit of bottle-green corduroy with shining brass buttons. The clothes were much too large for him, and the trousers were so stiff that he could scarcely sit down. He was hurried into the corduroys, of which he hated the smell, and after having some more bread and milk the journey was resumed. He never again saw his own warm, woollen garments, which had been exchanged for the corduroys and a horsecloth. The horse-cover became his coverlet by night, and beneath it he slept more comfortably than before on his straw couch. On the following morning at an early hour, while Hugh was still asleep, they reached another large town. As usual the cart was drawn up at an inn, where the travellers passed the day. During the day, while Welsh was out in the town and his aunt dozing by the fire, Hugh slipped quietly to the innkeeper, and tried to tell him the story of his wrongs ; but the man could not comprehend what he said, and he could not understand what the man said owing to the brogue. The child's earnestness drew a little crowd round him, and he was just beginning to make himself understood, 46 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND when the uncle returned suddenly and whisked him off to the cart, where he was obliged to spend the long afternoon, until at nightfall they resumed their journey. He heard angry words between his uncle and the innkeeper, but no deliverance came, and his heart once more sank within him. He passed another miserable night, and on the forenoon of the following day they arrived at Drogheda. After a short pause at Drogheda, during which he was not permitted to descend from the cart or communicate with any stranger, the journey was resumed, and the party arrived at Welsh's home on the banks of the Boyne late in the afternoon. Such is the story of Hugh Bronte's journey from his father's home to Welsh's. It was first told me by my old tutor, the Rev. William McAllister, and confirmed subsequently by several of his friends who were men of education and intelligence. I was careful to get the details of the different nights' march as fully as possible, in hopes that they might give some clue to the route. By four independent narrators the account was repeated to me. The narrations differed in certain details, but all were agreed on the main incidents as I have given them. I have omitted several striking incidents of the journey on which all four were not agreed. Even in details the narrators did not differ greatly, but all were at one as to the four nights A FEARFUL JOURNEY 47 spent on the road, the villages and towns passed through, the appearance of the country on the first morning of the journey, and other leading facts. I have given a mere outline of Hugh Bronte's thrilling tale, without any attempt to reproduce his style. The experience of the boy on that dreadful journey was told by the man with dramatic power and pent-up passion, such as never failed to hold his listeners spellbound. Nothing was wanting to give colour and reality to Hugh Bronte's eloquence. He spoke of the stunted trees on the wind-swept mountains, and ghostly shadows on the moon-bleached plains. He described the desolate bogs on the waysides, and the interminable stretches of road leading over narrow bridges and through shallow fords ; and sometimes he would thrill his audience by a de- scription of the heavens on fire with stars, or the autumn stricken into gold by the setting sun. He possessed the rare faculty of seeing as well as thinking what he was speaking of. He made his listeners see and feel as well as hear. Mr. McAllister had heard most of the orators of his time, including O'Connell and Cooke and Chalmers, but no man ever touched or roused and thrilled him by the force of eloquence as old Hugh Bronte had done. It may be questioned if any tale ever told by Hugh Bronte's granddaughters equalled those 48 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND which he narrated in wealth of imagination, or picturesque eloquence, or intensity of human feel- ing, or vividness of colouring, or immediate effect. The grandfather had few of the cultured literary- touches of the novelists, but he was generally the hero of his own romances, and narrated them with a rugged pathos and ferocious energy which went straight to the heart, but cannot be transferred to paper. Welsh Bronte travelled by night partly for the sake of economy in saving the expenses of lodgings, but more especially that little Hugh should see no landmarks by which his footsteps might ever be guided home. In both respects he was thoroughly successful. He was able to doze all day long in public-houses without charge ; and Hugh, though he believed he had come from the south, never had the slightest idea as to where his father's house was located. Do the incidents of the journey give us any clue by which to discover the region where Hugh Bronte's father lived ? The journey occupied four whole nights of an average of from thirteen to fifteen hours each. The rate of progress on the bad roads would not much exceed two and a quarter miles per hour, and the whole distance traversed might be fairly supposed to be some- where about a hundred or a hundred and twenty miles. A FEARFUL JOURNEY 49 With these facts in view I spent the two months of my undergraduate holidays in trying to find the early home of Hugh Bronte. I went about my work dressed in the ordinary clothes of an Irish peasant. I lived with the people, and enjoyed their hospitality and fun. Everybody was willing to aid me in my researches after a lost home and friends, but with every assistance I could find no trace or tradition of a Bronte family south of the Boyne. I did not then altogether abandon my quest, and I have since written hundreds of letters on the subject to correspondents in various parts of Ireland. But unless some document, now un- known to me, comes to light, the early home of Hugh Bronte will never be known.* What is of more importance is the fact that the ancient home of the Brontes, where Hugh's grandfather — the great-great-great-grandfather of the novelists — lived, was on the north side of the river Boyne, between Oldbridge and Navan, not far from the spot where William of Orange won the famous battle of the Boyne. Some thirty-five years ago the place where the Bronte house once stood was pointed out to me The potato blight and other calamities have been * It is quite possible I may have been on the wrong track. Mr. McCracken assures me that Hugh BrontS spoke with a distinctly Scotch accent. His journey, after all, may have been from the north, and the child may have mistaken the waters of a lake for the sea. 50 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND Steadily removing landmarks in Ireland, and I fear that the local ti'adition has now faded from the district. In this there is nothing surprising or unusual. Few families in Ireland of the rank of the Brontes could trace their pedigree to the sixth or seventh generation.* That the ancestors of the Brontes lived on the banks of the Boyne six or seven generations back is beyond all doubt. Hugh's account of the place was precise and definite, and his daughter Alice distinctly remembered the aunt Mary, Welsh's widow, coming from the neighbour- hood of Drogheda to visit Hugh and his family in County Down. Indeed, she referred to the fact, in a short interview in 1890 with the Rev. J. B. Lusk, when she was on her deathbed. * With the exception of AHce, with whom I was in corres- pondence, directly and indirectly, up to her death, none of the Irish Brontes knew anything of the early history of the family. I visited most of them, and the vague information they had to communicate was merely an echo from the English biogra- phies. Even Alice mixed up different events in a way some- times that made it difScult to disentangle them. CHAPTER VII A MISERABLE HOME HUGH BRONTE arrived at his uncle's house hungry, weary, and numbed with cold. He was also suffering acute pain from the incessant jolting of the springless cart in which he had lain, and from his uncle's blows and shakings. He was a little mite in stiff corduroys, of which he loathed the smell and touch ; but he learned to be less fastidious. On his arrival his uncle had a short conversation with him, with a view to a right understanding as to their future relations and duties. Seizing his little nephew and ward firmly by the two shoulders, and looking fiercely in his face, Welsh informed him that his father was a mean and black-hearted scoundrel. Welsh, according to his own account, had agreed to make Hugh his heir, and give him the " education of a gentleman," and in consideration of these advantages Hugh's father had promised to pay Welsh a sum of £^o ; but the spalpeen and deceiver had only paid .£^5, and Hugh 5 SI 52 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND would have to work for his bread and go without education. These grave decisions were emphasised by a series of very strong words, which Hugh always repeated, but which my reader does not care to hear. Are they not written in the records of Wuthering Heights ? There was present at this family interview a tall, gaunt, half-naked savage, called Gallagher, who seemed to know all about the matter under dis- cussion, as he expressed audible approval of every- thing Welsh said, and when he had finished called on the Blessed Virgin and all the saints to blast Hugh's father and protect his uncle. Encouraged on these lines, he submitted for Hugh's consideration the utter absurdity of a boy with such a father hoping for happiness here or for heaven hereafter, especially as he would have all the blessed saints against him. This sanctimonious individual was the steward of Welsh's house. He had been very useful to Welsh as a spy when he was sub-agent of the estate. He would mix with the lowest strata of the people at fairs and markets, make them drunk, and extract their secrets. He thus succeeded in sounding depths to which the sub-agent could not descend. He also frequented dances, wakes, and funerals ; and as he had a great power of turning on the outward signs of sympathy and sorrow, he became Welsh's most valuable ally. In fact, he was mdis- A MISERABLE HOME 53 pensable to the office in the successful management of the estate. Hugh's father had once denounced Gallagher as a spy at a public gathering, and he was ignomini- ously ejected, and in return Gallagher had supplied the evidence — false evidence — which led to the conviction and imprisonment of the three brothers. On the murder of the agent and burning of the Bronte house, Welsh and his spy fell together, and they continued to hold together as master and servant. Gallagher had been of service to Welsh in other ways. He was the associate of Meg, and had aided her in the schemes which led to Mary Bronte becoming Welsh's wife. He was present with Meg as a witness in the plantation on that fatal night when Mary consented to wed Welsh. She was given to understand that if she refused her shame would be trumpeted all over the land by Meg and Gallagher on the following day. Gallagher was a partner with Meg in the foundling business, and they had more effective ways of dealing with superfluous children than have yet been discovered by our modern baby farmers. The children were supposed to be carried to the Dublin Foundling Hospital ; but no questions were asked and no receipts given, and the guilty parents were only too well pleased that their offsprings should go " where the wicked cease from troubling." 54 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND Gallagher and Meg knew their employers well, and acted in accordance with their wishes. The two con.ederates were closely bound together by their trade secret and by the common danger of exposure ; for although those were the palmy days of landlord " law and order," it was always possible that some meddlesome magistrate might so far deflect the law from its primary purpose — the extraction of rent — as to bring it to bear on the wholesale murder of bastards. The thing feared came to pass, and Gallagher and Meg were trans- ported ; but it came out in the evidence that Welsh, in the period of his prosperity, had so taken advantage of his opportunities, that he might have had a houseful of heirs but for the friendly intervention of Meg and Gallagher. Gallagher was the original from whom Emily Bronte drew her portrait of Joseph in Wuthering Heights. He was one of Hugh Bronte's chief characters. On him he used to pour out the copious vials of Bronte satire, scorn, and hatred. Everybody who knew anything of Hugh Bronte's stories must have heard of Gallagher. In fact, the name became of common use in the neigh- bourhood of Ballynaskeagh as a nickname for objectionable persons, and I think it is so used still. At present I know a County Down family in London who often employ the sobriquet in jest, though with a basis of seriousness. To my A MISERABLE HOME 55 mind it is just as certain that Joseph is the lineal descendant of Gallagher as that Heathcliffe is modelled on Welsh. In neither case is there room for reasonable doubt. Joseph's hypocrisy is of the stern Protestant type, Gallagher's of the wily Catholic type. Joseph raked the Bible promises to himself, and left the threatenings to his enemies ; Gallagher took " the Blessed Virgin and all the saints " into his service, and arrayed them against his foes. Visitations which were calamities to Gallagher and his friends were judgments on his enemies. Joseph, like Gallagher, used language of unfathomable and indefinite virulency, and in all respects he follows the outline of his prototype, but he is not the very image of the man. In Emily Bronte's hands, Joseph, the English villain, is less selfish, less cunning, less criminal, less dastardly than the Irish. Joseph, the ideal creation, is not a lovable character, but he is less hateful than the real Gallagher. It was to the companionship of this inhuman monster that Welsh committed his little nephew and ward. As soon as Welsh and Gallagher had left off speaking, Hugh looked round the mansion to which he had become presumptive heir. A happy pig with a large and happy family lay in one side of the room in which he stood. Smouldering ashes on a hearth, under a great open chimney. $6 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND indicated that the house was a place of human habitation. A stack of peat was heaped up on the other side of the fire from that devoted to the mother-pig and her progeny. A broad, square bed- stead stood in the end of the room farthest from the fire, raised about a foot from the ground. The damp, uneven, earthen floor was unswept. There were a few chairs upholstered with straw ropes, and on the backs of these a succession of hens took their places in turn, preliminary to a loftier flight to the cross-beama close up to the thatch. It was a low room, so they had not to make a great effort to reach their perches. A lean, long-backed, rough- haired, yellow dog stood by the boy's side smelling him, but in a neutral frame of mind, and showing no signs of welcome. Hugh had heard the hard, rasping words regard- ing his father's treachery, and about his own duties and prospects ; but he did not take in fully the situation, and he simply by way of reply said, " Are you going home soon ? " " You are at home now," replied his uncle. " This is the only home you shall ever know, and you are beholden to me for it. No airs here, my fine fellow ! Your father was glad to be rid of you, and this is the gratitude you show me for taking you to be my heir. Get to bed out of my way, and I'll find you something to do in the morning to keep you from becoming too great for the position." A MISERABLE HOME 57 But in the morning the child was unable to leave the hard, damp bed, in which he had lain down with loathing. He had been obliged to lie across the foot of the bed at his uncle and aunt's feet, but his slumbers were disturbed by the grunting pig, and squealing young, which seemed to keep up an incessant struggle and contest for choice places. There were also two cocks, nearly over his head, that had several bouts of crowing in rivalry during the night, the hens occasionally expressing approval. The uncle rose early to let out the hens to find the early worm, and the great mother-pig to take an airing. He then dragged little Hugh out of bed, doubtless that he might get early into training for the coming responsibilities of heirship. But the child, unable to stand, tottered on to the fit)or. His uncle at first thought him shamming, but fierce imprecations could not exorcise fever and delirium, and for many weeks little Hugh lingered between life and death. No doctor saw him, but he remembered his hair being cut off, and he did not forget the unfailing two-milk posset with which his aunt kept him supplied. He remained weak and unable to go out during the winter, but he made many friends. The pig had been allowed to depart as soon as she was considered convalescent and competent to manage her large family. The rough dog had proved a warm friend — dogs were always steadfast S8 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND friends to the Brontes. He used to lie across the bed, beside the child, all day long, licking his face and hands, and waiting with patient fidelity his restoration to health. At night he would lie on the bare ground by the bedside, but as soon as the elders had vacated the bed in the morning he would take the empty place beside his little friend. The dog's delight seemed to know no bounds when the child began to get out of bed for a few hours daily. He would make various kinds of inarticulate sounds to express his pent-up feelings, and cut uncouth capers all round, sometimes rush- ing outside the house and barking furiously, as if to decoy the invalid beyond the threshold into the open air. Then he would sit with him, and lie with him on the sheepskin by the fire, and with dog-like constancy and affection watch every movement of his little hero. And the child in return loved the great shaggy creature with all the strength of his little crushed heart. Hugh Bronte used to say that at first he passionately longed for death, that he might escape from his squalid surroundings and from his tor- mentors ; but with his growing love for the dog he earnestly desired to live, and he believed that but for the dog he should have died. He also came to long for the crowing of the cocks in the morning. There were two of them ; one a A MISERABLE HOME 59 bantam, and the other a great barn-door bird with flaming comb and splendid tufts of feathers like a guardsman's helmet. The great cock tried to thrill the lady hens by a voice that should have struck terror into the hearts of bantams ; but the bantam retorted by a little piping, perliteful crow, that seemed to deprecate the vulgarity of seeking popularity by loud and pompous ways. In the long, weary days the fowls became his attached friends. He used to save a few crumbs from his own scanty allowance, and they would feed from his hands without hurting him. Better still, his aunt Mary during his illness conceived a great affection for him, and loved him as if he were her own child. When Welsh was not present she would let him have an egg, or a little fresh butter, from the nieskin that was prepared for the market, or, what was much more prized, a cup of peppermint-tea, the forerunner of the universal beverage. Over the peppermint-tea Aunt Mary became communicative, and then, and in after-years, she told him secretly the tragic story of the Bronte family. It brought him no immediate relief at first, but in after-years it was a great source of satisfaction to him to know that the cowardly and tyrannical uncle was no Bronte at all, and not even an Irishman. On the subject of Welsh's nationality Hugh 6o THE BRONTES IN IRELAND Bronte's fiery patriotism was wont to appear. He would denounce the foreigner as the blighter of his life and the curse of his country. The denunciation of the foreign element was always productive of mixed sentiments in County Down, where a large proportion of the people were descendants of either English or Scotch settlers ; but Hugh Bronte's convictions seemed always to grow more decisive in the face of opposition, and from the crucible of contradiction his words flowed like red-hot lava. His aunt's husband had been a dastardly despot as well as a base-born bully, and he held that all foreigners were like him. The spring came early that year, and with it health and vigour. Hugh revelled in the fresh air with his faithful dog Keeper. His aunt had told him of the burning of the old Bronte house. He saw the extensive ruins, and he kept away as much as possible from Welsh's inhabited hovel, which consisted simply of one of the large rooms with a roof thrown over the charred and crumbling walls. The squalor and wretchedness of the home into which so many things crept at night, compared with the ruins of the house in which his father had been brought up, made a lasting impression on Hugh's mind. But he was not long left to such reflections. As soon as he was able to go he was sent to herd the cattle, which were housed at night in other ruined A MISERABLE HOME 6 1 rooms of the burnt edifice. Hugh's duty was to prevent the cows and sheep from passing over a low fence from their pasture to growing corn on the other side of the fence. The days were long, but he enjoyed them. Keeper was a famous ratter, and there was much for him to do in that line ; but in his laborious efforts to exterminate the rats he never forgot his higher duties, and he would stop in the heat and excitement of an ardent hunt to head off any of the cattle that seemed disposed to trespass on forbidden ground. Keeper sometimes rewarded his master by capturing a rabbit, and then there would be a feast for both boy and dog. Emily Bronte's love for her dog, which was actually called " Keeper," was a weak platonic affair, a girlish whim or lingering family tradition, compared with the deep, strong tie of interest and affection that bound the desolate boy and friendless dog to one another. Keeper had at first scanned the newly arrived child with a critical eye, and as a kind of rival had given him a cold welcome ; but he had watched by him in sickness as only a dog could, and adapted himself to every mood of his returning strength and growing spirit, never be- coming too buoyant or boisterous until his health was completely restored. It was an affection based on common interests and mutual esteem, and required no treaty or covenant to render it binding, 62 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND The dog for years never lost sight of his master. Absence was not needed to make the heart grow fonder. He lay close to him at night, dreaming of happy morrows, and awoke to joy in his master's love and fellowship. When Keeper received a kick, as he often did, the child showed sullen resentment, at the risk of being treated in the same humane fashion himself ; and when little Bronte was being scolded or beaten by Welsh or Gallagher, which was a matter of almost daily occurrence, the dog showed dangerous signs of springing at the throat of the common enemy. In no land has attachment to home so firm a grip of the heart as in Ireland. Hugh Bronte was a mere child when he passed from the light of his father's home into the darkness of night and servitude ; but his heart never ceased to ache for the home of his childhood, and the friends he had lost. He used to watch every well-dressed man that appeared on the road passing the farm, in hope that he might be his father and deliverer, but his hopes were always blighted, as the traveller passed by on his own errand. He often started at night in bed, believing that he had heard familiar voices at the door ; but the voices were not repeated to his waking ears. Year followed year in slow procession and ever- varying form. Now it passed clad in the virgin A MISERABLE HOME 63 robes of spring, accompanied by the joyous min- strelsy of birds ; now decked in the bridal array of autumn, russet and gold, with yellow grain and rosy apples ; and now it settled in the snowy shroud of death. Each season had its charms for the Bronte child. The silent awaking of spring, the storm-bent trees roaring like a sea rushing on the beach, the brattling thunder and blue skies, the lashing hail and silent snow, seemed a part of the boy shut out to their companionship. He grew up in solitariness, and looked on the elements as friends ; but his heart never ceased to yearn for the lost friends of his old home. His corduroy suit soon became too small, but it was pieced and patched until the original had all been supplanted. When his boots became unwearable he was obliged to go barefooted. There was no comb, and little .soap, among the domestic arrangements of his uncle's home ; but the boy enjoyed his rough, free life, revelling in unkempt and unwashed nature. His highest enjoy- ment was to be away with his dog, beyond the espionage of Gallagher and the rasping blasphemy of Welsh. But his idle days with Keeper among the bees in the clover soon gave place to sterner duties. He had to gather potatoes after the diggers in sleet and rain, collect stones off the fields in winter to drain bog-land, take his part in all the drudgery of an ill-cultivated farm from 64 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND sunrise to sunset, and then thresh and winnow grain in the barn till near midnight. He had grown too big to sleep across the bed at the feet of his uncle and aunt, and he had to lie on a sack of chaff in the half-roofed barn. His uncle hated him with a fierce and bitter hatred. In fact, he never saw his uncle's face but it was ugly with anger, or heard his voice except in accents of reproach ; and he had come to expect nothing else, for his uncle once told him he could never beat him when he did not deserve it, for like a goat he was always going to mischief or coming from it. Hugh had no one but Gallagher to whom he could speak during his working hours, and he found the cunning malignity of Gallagher harder to endure than the harsh cruelty of his uncle. He always felt the eye and shadow of the spy upon him. The boy's clear instinct told him Gallagher was a bad man, but sometimes the pent-up heart would overflow, and the sealed lips babble to the one human being near him ; and then Gallagher would feign sympathy and extract from the boy all his secrets, even those that his aunt had communicated to him in confidence. He would also lead him on by the memory of cruel wrongs to give expression to the passionate resentment that slumbered in him. When Gallagher had got all the secrets that A MISERABLE HOME 65 were in the boy's heart he would denounce him to his uncle, setting forth each item in the manner that would best stir up his cruelty. Sometimes Gallagher would mock and jeer at the rags and destitute condition of the boy, and tell him that all his evils came upon him from the blessed saints and because of his father's sins, and he would assure him that the devil would carry him away from the barn some night, as he had often taken bad men's sons. Hugh was not much alarmed by day at the prospect of Satanic visitations, but he used to lie awake at night in the utmost terror of the fiend. He used to cover his head for fear of seeing him, and when he slept he dreamt of being chased and carried off by demons. Owing to Gallagher's words the peaceful nights, in which he used to forget his griefs, became more dreaded by him than the day. It is very probable that Hugh may have con- veyed to his sons something of his own early vivid conceptions of a personal devil, for, as we shall see, one of them used to go forth to actual physical conflict with the fiend. Gallagher used to drive Hugh almost wild by telling him stories of the beatings he had adminis- tered to his father when they were both boys, the facts having been quite the other way ; and indeed the cruelties practised on the boy were Gallagher's 66 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND base revenge for the whippings that Hugh's father used to administer to him. Gallagher employed every means that his cunning and malignity could devise to render the boy's life miserable. He would purloin eggs, and break the farming tools, and maim the cattle, in order to have him beaten by his uncle. And he always managed to be present when Hugh was beaten, and he would on these occasions assure him that the punishment came to him from " the blessed saints." CHAPTER VIII THE CAPTIVE ESCAPES THE uncle was an ill-tempered, ill-conditioned man in all transactions with strangers as well as in his domestic relations. In fairs and markets he had many quarrels, and often came home bear- ing marks of violence. He had a standing quarrel with a neighbour about a piece of exhausted bog. Nothing in, Ireland is supposed to test a man's honesty like a piece of waste land lying contiguous to his own land. " If a man escape with honour as a trustee, try him with a bit of bog," is an Irish proverb. The temptation had come in Welsh's way when he was a sub-agent with great facilities for helping himself at the expense of the tenants. He had robbed the Brontes of their farm, — why should he hesitate to add a slice of bog to it ? Of course he had more land than he could cultivate, but his neighbour's bog was just needed to round off his ill-gotten possession. The owner was known by the office as a foolish and objectionable tenant, who actually had the 6 67 68 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND audacity to vote at elections contrary to the con- scientious convictions of his landlord, and under the circumstances the agent would be easily pre- vailed upon to let Welsh have what he wanted. There was not likely to be any trouble over the matter, for the bog was of little use to any- body ; all the turf had been removed, and only a swamp remained covered with star-grass, a.id tenanted by water-hens, coots, and snipe. The agent offered to let Welsh have his neighr hour's bog for a consideration. Welsh paid the sum, but the tenant, being a cantankerous person, did not fall in pleasantly with the arrangement. Difficulties of a magnitude out of all proportion to the insignificance of the matter were raised. The plundering of the Brontes had been watched by the neighbours with sullen indignation, but when it became known that the objectionable sub- agent was about to lay hands on the property of another farmer the smouldering fire burst into conflagration. Attempts to transfer the bog were frustrated, and while matters were in this un- satisfactory condition the agent was murdered and Welsh's house was burned to the ground. The ownership of the bog remained in that doubtful condition so profitable to those in authority. Welsh had lost his official position, and for years the new agent gave fair promises to both claimants and accepted presents from both. The THE CAPTIVE ESCAPES 69 landlord would of course decide the matter, but he was always in foreign parts, and could not be troubled with such a small detail till he returned to Ireland. Meanwhile both paid rent for the bog and fought for the useless star-grass. Welsh was persistent in maintaining his claim to the coveted possession. He would wade into the swamp up to his waist to cut the sapless star-grass, and one day, after many hot words with the owner, blows ensued, and he was badly beaten. He called on Hugh, who was then a large boy of fifteen, to help ; but he called in vain, for Hugh had listened to a full and detailed account of his uncle's crimes before the battle began. He was accused to his teeth of murdering old Bronte for his money, and betraying his daughter in order to rob the family of their estate. The misery he had brought to many homes was clearly set forth, and in Welsh's attempt to take possession of his neigh- bour's property Hugh believed that he was utterly in the wrong, and deserved the beating he received ; besides, the neighbour (whose name has escaped me) had always treated Hugh kindly, and on several occasions had shared with him the collation of bread and milk that had been brought to him in the fields in the afternoon. This battle led to important issues. The uncle was carried home, bruised and bleeding, by 70 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND Gallagher and Hugh and put to bed. On the following morning he sent for Hugh. In a choking passion he demanded why he had not helped him in the fight. Hugh replied that he considered his uncle was in the wrong, but that in any case it would have been unfair for him to have interfered. The uncle stormed as usual, but was unable to get out of bed to chastise his nephew. Hugh now found an opportunity that he had long been waiting for to press deferred claims. He reminded his uncle of the false promises he had made to his parents and himself when taking him from his home ; of his failure to send him to school, or even to provide him with clothes to wear ; and he reproached him with the fiendish manner in which he had always treated him. He ended his harangue by a fierce demand that he would let him return home, or else that he would provide him with clothes and send him to school. Hugh, having found the use of his tongue in his uncle's presence, pleaded his case with a courage that surprised himself He told his uncle that he was a false and cruel bully, and that he thoroughly deserved the beating at the hands of the man he had tried to rob ; and then, carried away by his rising passion, he told him he knew he was not a true Bronte, but a gutter-monster who had stolen the name ; he defiantly added that he hoped THE CAPTIVE ESCAPES 71 before long to be able to avenge his ancestors for the desecration of their name by thrashing him himself. Having delivered this speech, Hugh became conscious that another crisis in his life had arrived. Even the chaff bed in the half-roofed barn would cease to be for him. His uncle's house was no longer childless. A son and heir had come on the scene a twelvemonth before, and Hugh knew he had nothing to expect but the same harsh treat- ment either in the present or the future. He could not even hope, in the event of his uncle's death, to inherit the old BrontS home and restore its fallen fortunes, for a legal heir had arrived and was well in possession. His uncle also had promised to punish him once for all as soon as he got well. A severe beating was his immediate prospect, for Welsh seldom failed in carrying out his evil promises. In a few days the uncle was out of bed and able to move about, his head wrapped in bandages and his two eyes draped in mourning. As he grew stronger he fixed the day on which he would chastise his nephew. Hugh saw that the time had come for him to shift for himself He first resolved to fight his uncle, but on consideration he concluded that even if he should be victorious, victory would only make his position in the house more un- endurable. Then he resolved on flight ; but where 72 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND could he fly ? He would certainly be followed and brought back, and then his state with his uncle would be worse than ever. Besides, he was almost naked, and the few rags that hung around him left his body visible at many points. He could not consult Gallagher fh his emergency, for during the suspense he never ceased to keep him in mind of his coming chastisement, and to assure him that it was the will of the saints that he should suffer for his father's sins. Keeper was his sole friend, but to escape with Keeper would lead to certain discovery. Hugh was now in a state of rebellion, and in his desperation he went to his uncle's enemy. People in their death-and-life struggle for free- dom do not scrutinise too closely the credentials of those willing to assist them. Hugh's neutrality during the battle must have commended him to the enemy, who indeed owed him something for not joining in the fight at a critical moment, when by stone or stick he might have turned the fortune of war in his uncle's favour. He told his uncle's chastiser the full tale of his sorrows, and found him a sympathising and resourceful ally. The day on which Hugh was to get his great beating arrived. Everybody except Gallagher awaited it in gloomy silence ; even Keeper seemed to know what was coming. The uncle had pro- THE CAPTIVE ESCAPES 73 vided himself with a stout hazel rod, which he playfully called "the tickler." Aunt Mary's eyes were, as usual, red with weeping. Preparation was made deliberately, and the chastisement was to be administered when the cattle were brought home at midday. Hugh and Gallagher spent that morning weeding in a field of oats, in a remote corner of the farm. Flugh was silent ; but Gallagher was loquacious and exasperating. He devoted the whole morning to jeers and taunts and mockery. As the hour arrived for Hugh to go for the cows, Gallagher surpassed all his previous brutality by telling him that he had once been his mother's lover. He was proceeding to develop his false but cruel tale, when Hugh, stung to the quick, and blind with passion, sprang upon his mother's defamer like a tiger. There was a short, fierce struggle, and Hugh had his tormentor on the ground, and was beating his face into a jelly, while at the same time Keeper was engaged in tearing the ruffian's clothes into shreds. Hugh's fury cooled when Gallagher no longer resisted, and throwing his thistle-hooks on the top of him as he lay prostrate in the corn, he walked into the house. He bade his aunt, who was baking bread, good-bye, kissed the baby, and then left to bring home the cattle to be milked. Keeper, who had laid aside his melancholy in 74 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND the encounter with Gallagher, responded to his master's whistle, and ran round him in wide circles barking and gambolling as if to keep his spirits up. As Hugh turned to take a last look at the old Bronte house, he saw Gallagher approaching Welsh, who was waiting near the cowshed, evidently enjoy- ing the pleasures of the imagination. The cattle were grazing on the banks of the Boyne, near the spot where a wing of William's army crossed, on that era-making day, in 1690. Hugh proceeded to the river, and deliberately divested himself of his rags preparatory to a plunge, as was his wont. He laid his tattered garments in a heap, and told Keeper to lie down upon them Then, throwing himself down naked beside his faithful friend, he took him in his arms and kissed him again and again, and starting up with a sob he plunged headlong into the river. The clothes were placed in a little hollow behind a ridge, from which Keeper could not see his master enter the water, or mark the direction in which he had gone. Hugh swam swiftly down the river. It was a swim for life. The current soon carried him oppo- site the farm of his uncle's enemy, who awaited his approach in a clump of willows by the water's edge. He had brought with him an improvised suit of clothes to further the boy's escape. The pockets of the coat were stuffed with oat-bread. THE CAPTIVE ESCAPES 75 and there were a few pence in the pockets of the trousers. Hugh hurried on the garments, which were much too large for him, and thrust his feet, the first time for seven years, into a pair of boots, and with a heart full of gratitude to his helper, and a final squeeze of his hand, unaccompanied by words from either, Hugh Bronte, about fifteen years old, started on his race for life and freedom. CHAPTER IX THE FLIGHT AND REFUGE WE have now reached more solid ground in the life of Hugh Bronte, and from this point onward his career, and that of his descendants, lie before us within well-defined geographical limits. With glad heart and buoyant spirits Hugh sped forward on the road to Dunleer, which town he passed through without pausing, and continuing his flight struck straight for Castlebellingham. To his latest days he spoke of the intoxication of joy with which he almost flew along the road, a boot in either hand. He did not know where the road led to, or whither he was going ; but he believed there was a city of refuge somewhere before, and his pace was quickened by the lurking fear that the avenger might be on his heels. As he approached Castlebellingham he heard a jaunting-car coming after him. He hid behind the fence till it had passed. It was laden with policemen, but in the summer evening light he could see that his uncle was not on the car. 76 THE FLIGHT AND REFUGE 77 He reached Dundalk at an early hour, and after a short sleep in the shelter of a hayrick, continued his journey, not by the public road, for freedom was too sweet to run any risks of being overtaken, but eastward through level fields, along the shore, where now runs the Dundalk and Greenore Railway. In a small public-house he was able to spend his last copper on a little food, and then he started for Carlingford, which he heard of from the publican as an important town behind the mountain. When he had wandered by the shore for a couple of hours, he saw smoke rising on his left, and he turned inland from the sea and came upon lime- kilns at a place called Mount Pleasant. These kilns came to be known as Swift McNeil's, and people went from gi'eat distances to purchase lime as well for agriculture as for building purposes. When Hugh arrived at the kilns there were thirty or forty carts from Down, Armagh, and Louth waiting for their loads, and there were not enough hands employed to keep up the supply. Lime- stone had to be quarried and wheeled to the kilns, then broken, and thrown in at the top with layers of coal. After burning for a time, the lime was drawn out from the eye of the kiln into shallow barrels and emptied into carts, the price being so much per barrel. Here Hugh Bronte found his first job, and regular remuneration for his free labour. In a 78 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND short time he had earned enough money to provide himself with a complete suit of clothes, the first he had had since he was six years of age, and he had now reached sixteen. His wages more than sufficed for his wants, and he had a great deal to spare for personal adornment. Being steady and much better dressed than the other workers, he was advanced to the responsible position of overseer. Hugh became a favourite with the people who came for lime, as well as with his employers. Among the most regular customers were the Todds atid the McAllisters of Ballynaskeagh and Glascar in County Down. Their servants were often accom- panied by a youth called McClory, who drove his own cart. McClory and Bronte, who were about the same age, resembled each other in the fiery colour of their hair. They became fast friends, and it was arranged that Bronte should visit McClory in County Down during the Christmas holidays. CHAPTER X LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT THE visit to McClory's house in County Down was another momentous step in the life of Hugh Bronte. He had shaken off the nightmare of cruel slavery. His work, mostly in the open air, suited him. He was well paid, had good food and clothing, and in two years the starved and ragged boy had become a large, handsome, well-dressed man. Like most handsome people, Hugh knew that he was handsome, and the resources of Dundalk were taxed in those days to the utmost to set off to perfection his manly and stately figure. On Christmas Eve Hugh Bronte drove up furiously in a Newry gig to the house of McClory in Ballynaskeagh. He was becoming a somewhat vain man, and fond of admiration ; and no doubt, as he approached McClory's thatched cottage, with his pockets full of money, and with the self-confidence which prosperity breeds, he meant to flutter the house with his magnificence. But a surprise was in store for him. The cottage 79 8o THE BRONTES IN IRELAND door was opened in response to l)is somewhat boisterous knock by a young woman of dazzling beauty. Hugh Bronte, previous to his flight, had seen few women except his aunt Mary, and in the days of his freedom he had become acquainted only with lodging-house keepers, and County Louth women, who carried their fowls and eggs to Dundalk fairs and markets. He had scarcely ever seen a comely girl, and never in his life any one who had any attractions for him. The simply dressed, artless girl who opened the door was probably the prettiest girl in County Down at the time. On this point there is absolute unanimity in all the statements that have reached me. The words " Irish beauty and pure Celt " have often been used in describing her. Her hair, which hung in a profusion of ringlets round her shoulders, was luminous gold. Her fore- head was Parian marble. Her evenly set teeth were lustrous pearls, and the roses of health glowed on her cheeks. She had the long dark- brown eyelashes that in Ireland so often accom- pany golden hair, and her deep hazel eyes had the violet tint and melting expression which in a diluted form descended to her granddaughters, and made the plain and irregular features of the Bronte girls really attractive. The eyes also con- tained the lambent fire that Mrs. Gaskell noticed in Charlotte's eyes, ready to flash indignation and LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT 8i scorn. She had a tall and stately figure, with head well poised above a graceful neck and well-formed bust ; but she did not communicate these graces of form to her granddaughters. There are people still living who remember the stately old woman " Ayles " Bronte, as she was called by her neighbours in her old age. Hugh Bronte was completely unmanned by the radiant beauty of the simple country girl who appeared before him. He stood awkwardly staring at her with his mouth open, fumbling with his hat, and trying in vain to say something. At last he stammered out a question about Mr. McClory, and the girl, who was Alice McClory, told him that her brother would soon be home, and invited him into the house. He entered blushing and feeling uncomfortable, but the unaffected simplicity of Alice McClory's manner soon put him at his ease, and before the brother Patrick, known afterwards as " Red Paddy," had returned home Hugh was madly and hopelessly in love with his sister. Like his son the Rev. Patrick Bronte in England, and like the Irish curate who proposed marriage to Charlotte on the strength of one night's acquaint- ance, Hugh, dazzled by beauty and blinded by love, declared his passion before he had discovered any signs of mutual liking, or had any evidence that his advances would be agreeable. 82 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND Alice, in a simple but cold and business-like manner, told him that she did not yet know him, but that, as he was a Protestant and she a Catholic, there was an insuperable bar between them. Hugh urged that he himself had no religion, never having darkened a church door, and that he was quite willing to be anything she wished him to be. Alice met his earnest pleadings with playful sallies, which disconcerted him, and little by little she led him to the story of his life, episodes of which she had heard from her brother. Sympathy leads to love, and Alice was moved greatly by Hugh's simple narrative. CHAPTER XI TRUE LOVE AND PARTY STRIFE THE Christmas holidays passed pleasantly under the hospitable roof of the McClory family. The chief amusement of the neighbour- hood was drinking in a shebeen, or local public- house ; but Hugh declined to accompany Paddy to the shebeen, preferring to share his sister's solitude. Before the holidays had come to a close Hugh and Alice had become engaged, but the course of true love in their case was destined to the pro- verbial fate. All Miss McCIory's friends were scandalised at the thought of her consenting to marry a Protestant. Religion among Catholics and Orangemen in those days consisted largely of party hatred. He was a good Protestant who, sober as well as drunk, cursed the Pope on the i2th of July, wore orange colours, and played with fife and drum a tune known as the Battle of the Boyne ; and he was a good Catholic who, in whatever condition, used equally emphatic language regarding King William. 7 «3 84 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND No more genuine expression of religious feeling was looked for on either side. There is a story told in the McClory district which illustrates the current religious sentiment. Two brother Orangemen, good men after their lights, had long been fast friends. They seldom missed an opportunity, in the presence of Catholics, of consigning the Pope to the uncomfortable place to which he himself has been wont to consign heretics. It happened that one of the two Orangemen fell sick, and when he was at the point of death his friend became greatly concerned about his spiritual state and visited him. He found him in an un- conscious condition and sinking fast, and, putting his lips close to the ear of his sick friend, he asked him to give him a sign that he felt spiritually happy. The dying man, with a last supreme effort, raised his voice above a whisper, and in the venerable and well-known formula cursed the Pope. His friend was comforted, believing that all was well. Whether this gruesome story be true or not, it goes to illustrate the fact that blasphemous bigotry had largely usurped the place of religion. But bitter party feeling did not end with mere words. Bloody battles between Orangemen and Catholics were periodically fought on the I2th of July, the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne, TRUE LOVE AND PARTY STRIFE 85 and on the 17th of March, St. Patrick's Day. Within six miles of McClory's house more than a dozen pitched battles were fought, sometimes with scythes tied on poles, and sometimes with firearms. One of these murderous onsets, known as the battle of Ballynafern, took place within sight of McClory's house. At Dolly's Brae a battle was fought in 1849 in presence of a large body of troops and con- stabulary, who remained neutral spectators of the conflict till the Catholics fled, and then the constabulary joined with the victors in firing on the flying foe. The scenes of these struggles, such as Tillyorier, Katesbridge, Hilltown, the Diamond, etc., are classic spots now. Each has had its poet, and ballads are sung to celebrate the prowess of the victors, who were uniformly the Orangemen, inasmuch as they used firearms, while the Catholics generally fought with pikes and scythes. Hugh Bronte had not yet discovered the deep and wide gulf that yawned between Protestants and Catholics, and so he made light of the religious objections of which he had heard so much from Alice. But the Catholic friends of Miss McClory, who had heard the Pope cursed by Protestant lips almost every day of their lives, could not stand by and see a Catholic lamb removed into the Protestant 86 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND shambles. They came to look on Bronte as a Protestant emissary, more influenced by a fiendish desire to plunder the Catholic fold than by love for their beautiful relative. Hugh Bronte in his eager simplicity wanted to supersede all opposition by getting married im- mediately, but so great a commotion ensued that he had to return to the kilns at Mount Pleasant, leaving his matrimonial prospects in a very un- satisfactory condition. Troops of relatives invaded the McClory house daily, and ardent Catholics tried in vain to argue down Alice McClory's newly kindled love. All the Roman Catholic neighbours joined in giving copious advice, and little was talked of at fairs and markets and chapel but the proposed marriage of Alice McClory to an unknown Protestant heretic. The priest also, as family friend, was drawn into the matter. In those days Irish priests were educated in France or Italy, and were generally men of culture and refinement. Their horizon had been widened. They had come in contact with the language, literatui'e, and social habits of other peoples, and they had become courteous men of the world. They had to some extent got out of touch with the fierce fanaticism of Irish party strife. The priest called on Miss McClory. Everybody TRUE LOVE AND PARTY STRIFE 87 knew that he had, and awaited the result ; but Alice's beauty and simplicity and tears made such an impression on the kind-hearted old priest, that his chivalrous instinct was aroused, and he was almost won to the lady's side. The centre oi the agitation then shifted from McClory's cottage to the priest's manse, and so hot was the anger of the infuriated Catholics that the good-natured priest promised, sorely against his will, that he would not consent to marry the pair. Hugh Bronte was nominally a Protestant, but he had not been in a church of any kind from the time he was five or six years of age ; he had received no religious instruction ; he could not read the Bible for himself, and no one had ever read it to him ; and he was as innocent of any religious bias or bigotry as a savage in Central Africa. Suddenly he found himself the chief figure in a fierce religious drama. At first he was greatly amused, and laughed at the very suggestion of his religion being considered a stumbling-block. From the time he left his father's house he had seldom heard the Divine name pronounced except in some form of malediction, and religion had brought no consolation to his hard life. He had never presumed to think that he had any relationship to the Church, its priests were so gorgeous and its people so well-to-do. Gallagher S8 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND had made him familiar with the dread powers of the infernal world, and with "the Blessed Virgin and the saints " in their malevolent capacity ; but the malignant hypocrisy of Gallagher was quite as repulsive to him as the vindictive blasphemy of his uncle. In fact, he had lived in an atmosphere untouched by the light or warmth of religion. Hugh's bondage and suffering had made him neither cringing nor cruel, and his freedom had come in time to permit the full development of a large and generous heart in a robust and healthy body. In his simplicity of heart he prevailed on Alice to invite her friends to meet him. He would soon remove their dislike with regard to his religion. Under the impulse of his enthusiasm he thought he could disarm prejudice by a frank and open avowal of his absolute indifference to all religions. Nothing perhaps in the whole history of the Brontes exceeded in interest that meeting. A dozen wily Ulster Catholics gathered round simple- hearted Hugh Bronte in Paddy McClory's kitchen. How the Orange champions would have trembled for the Protestant cause if they had been aware of Hugh's danger ! The preliminary salutations over, a black bottle was produced and a glass of whiskey handed round. Hugh had never learned to drink whiskey, and at that time detested the very smell of it. TRUE LOVE AND PARTY STRIFE 89 His refusal to drink with McClory's friends was the first ground of offence, but the whiskey had not yet brought the drinkers into the quarrelsome mood. When several bottles of McClory's whiskey had been drunk, and the temperature of the guests had risen proportionately, the religious question was approached. Bronte was urged in peremptory tones to abjure Protestantism. He had his answer ready. He was no more a Protestant than they were, and he had no Protestantism to abjure. ' Will you then curse King William ? " said a fiery little man who had taken much liquor, and seemed to be the spokesman of the party. There is a principle in human nature which has been taken far too little account of by both philo- sophers and peasants. It has been the dominant principle in many of the important decisions that have sealed the fate of nations as well as of indi- viduals. The principle is expressed by a word which is always pronounced in one way by the cultured, and in quite a different way by the un- lettered. The word in its illiterate use is " con- tra/ryness," and but for the principle expressed by this word the Bronte girls would never have made their mark in literature, and this history would never have been written. " Curse King William ! " shouted the fiery little man, supported by a hoarse echo from the other go THE BRONTES IN IRELAND half-tipsy guests, all of whom had turned fierce and glowing eyes on the supposed Protestant. " I cannot curse King William," replied Hugh, smiling. " He never did me any harm ; besides, he is beyond the region of my blessings and cursings ; but," he added, warming with his subject, " I should not mind cursing the Pope, if he is the author of your fierce and besotted religion." Alice first saw the danger, and uttered a sharp cry. Suddenly the family party sprang upon Hugh as the ambushed Philistines once flung themselves on Samson ; but he shook them off, and left them sprawling on the floor. Alice drew him from the house, bleeding and dishevelled, and after a tender parting in the grove beside the stream he started on foot for Mount Pleasant. Two immediate results followed that conflict : Hugh Bronte became a furious Protestant and a frantic lover. There was no lukewarmness or indiff'erence as to his Protestantism. The Bronte contrairyness had met the kind of opposition to give it a stubborn set, and he there and then became a Protestant double-dyed in the warp and in the woof. The process of his conversion, such as it waSi was prompt, decisive, effectual. It was in its early stages Orange in hue and militant in fibre, and was a genuine product of the times. Hugh's love for Alice was fanned into a fierce TRUE LOVE AND PARTY STRIFE 91 flame by the events of that night. When he first met her he had been dazzled by her rare beauty. He had seen few women, and never one like Alice, For the first time he had come under the spell of a simple and beautiful girl. They were young, shy lovers ; very happy in each other's company, but each sufficiently self-possessed to be happy enough in self From the furnace of contradiction on that night the jewel love had leaped forth. Each was drawn out from the self-centre in which each j;iad been concentrated in self ; he to declare his love in the face of relentless foes, and she to cling to him and protect him when bruised and torn by her friends. Beneath the pines that night they pledged with mingling tears undying love. They parted, but their hearts were one ; and persecution, poverty, and bereavement only welded them more closely together in the changing years.* * For much that is vivid in this scene I am indebted to a younger Paddy McClory. He was an old, and most in- telligent servant of Mr. McKee's, and died some years ago at a very great age. He was a Roman Catholic, and had a son killed in the battle of Ballynaferu. CHAPTER XII love's subterfuges HUGH returned to the Mount Pleasant Kilns, but his heart was no longer in his work. The burning of lime requires incessant care. The limestones must be broken to a proper size, layers of coal in due proportion must be added, and there must be constant watchfulness lest the fires should die out. Farmers' sons and servants started generally from County Down about , midnight, and after travelling all night arrived at the kilns for their loads about dawn. A badly burnt kiln of lime was a grave loss to the owners, as well as a serious disappointment to the customers, and likely to result in loss of custom. There were many complaints as to the character of the lime immediately after Christmas, and the farmers on several occasions found on slaking their loads at home that only the surface of the stones was burnt, and that they had paid for and imported heaps of raw limestone. 92 LOVE'S SUBTERFUGES 93 Hugh's thoughts were not in his business. He had made several Sunday journeys to Ballynas- keagh to have secret meetings with Alice. They met in the grove by the brook, in a spot still , ^ L I THE COURTING BOWER. pointed out as the " Lover's Arbour " or " Courting Bower," and there, under willows festooned with ivy and honeysuckle and sweetbriar, they spent lonely but happy Sundays. They were at last betrayed by a Catholic servant, 94 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND who had been entrusted with a letter to Alice. Then began a system of espionage and petty persecution, and all the forces of the McClory clan were united in an effort to compel Alice to marry a Catholic neighbour called Joe Burns. At this time Hugh began to learn to read and write, and he succeeded so far by the light from the eye of the kiln at night as to be able to write love-letters which Alice was able to read. He also about the same time succeeded in spelling his way through the New Testament. News from the north had reached his fellow- workers that he was a Protestant firebrand, that he had cursed the Pope, and made a savage attack on some harmless Catholics. At the kilns his manner had changed, and he had become moody and morose. Besides, he was constantly reading a little book by the light of the burning lime at night, instead of telling stories and singing songs, as in former times. The book was said to be the Bible ; but it was, in fact, the New Testament. A plot was immediately hatched to get rid of so dangerous a colleague. One of the Catholics under- took, as usual, to look after the kilns while Hugh made an expedition to County Down ; but he not only failed to charge the kilns properly, but sent for the owner on Monday morning early that he might see for himself the condition of things. The northern carts arrived by dawn, to find LOVE'S SUBTERFUGES 95 that there was nothing for them but unburnt Hme. While the matter was being explained Hugh arrived, haggard and weary after his night's journey, and was peremptorily dismissed, without any explanation from either side being tendered or accepted. I have no record of Hugh's proceedings imme- diately after his dismissal, but he must have been reduced to considerable straits, for he went to the hiring ground in Newry, and engaged him^self as a common servant-boy to a farmer who resided in Donoughmore. As a farm labotirer in those days he would receive about £6 per annum, with board and lodging ; but, then, he was near his Alice, and that made every burden light. Hugh's new master, James Harshaw, was not an ordinary farmer. The Harshaws had occupied the farm from early in the fifteenth century, and James, who had received the education of a gentleman, had behind him the traditions of an old and re- spectable family. In the Harshaws' home shrewd and steady industry was brightened by culture and refinement. The wheel of fortune had brought Hugh BrontS into a family where mental alacrity had full play. Bronte seems to have been treated with con- sideration and kindness by the Harshaws, who probably recognised in him something superior to the ordinary farm-servant. At any rate, in those 96 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND days the walls of class distinction were not raised so high as now, and the Harshaw children taught him to read. Hugh was much with the family. He drove them to Donoughmore Presbyterian Meeting House on Sundays, and sat with them in their pew, and he accompanied them to rustic singing parties and such local gatherings. He used to drive them in the summer-time to Warrenpoint and Newcastle, and other watering-places, and remain with them as their attendant. In such treatment of a servant there was nothing unusual, and Mr. John Harshaw, the present pro- prietor of the ancestral home, has no very decisive information regarding this particular servant. He says :, " The probability is that Hugh Bronte hired with my grandfather, whose land touched the Lough ; but I fear it is too true that he passed through my grandfather's service and left no permanent record behind him." I think it is more than probable that Bronte repaid his young masters and mistresses for their teaching by telling them stories. Under Harshaw's roof he found not only work and shelter, but a home and comfort ; and it is inconceivable that under those circumstances he allowed the gift that was in him of charming by vivid narration to lie dormant. As long as he lived he spoke of the Harshaws LOVE'S SUBTERFUGES 97 with gratitude and affection, and I do not believe he could have been so glad and happy writhout contributing to the general enjoyment. In the latter part of the last century the raconteur occupied the place in Ireland now taken by the modern novel, and I believe Hugh Bronte dropped doctrine into the minds of the young Harshaws which produced far-reaching results. Such was the fixed conviction of my old teacher, the Rev. William McAllister. It happened that the Martins, another ancient family, lived quite near to the Harshaws. The land of the two families enclosed Loughorne Lough round. The Martins were rich and somewhat aris- tocratic; but the two families were thrown much together, and Samuel Martin, the son of the one house, married Jane Harshaw, the daughter of the other. She was a deeply religious and resolute woman, with a stern sense of duty. One of her nephews, the Rev. R. H. Harshaw, tells me she always conducted family worship after the death of her husband. She died of a fever, caught while ministering to the dying, in accordance with her high sen.se of Christian duty. Her life was given for others, and at her funeral the Rev. S. J. Moore summed up her character as "a woman who knew her duty, and did it." Her second son, John Martin, inherited his 98 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND mother's great mental capacity and strong sense of duty. At school in Newry he met young John Mitchell, and inspired him with something of his own enthusiasm, and the two youths came to the conclusion that it was their duty to put right Ireland's wrongs. John Mitchell was sent to penal servitude for fifteen or twenty years, and then John Martin stepped into the place vacated by his friend, and was transported to Van Diemen's Land for ten years. The conviction of "honest John Martin" gave a blow to the old system in Ireland from which it has never recovered. Even his enemies were shocked at the severity of the sentence ; but, then, he had written a pamphlet under the text, " Your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate" (Isa. i. 7). He had proclaimed from the housetops Hugh Bronte's tenant-right doctrines, of which more anon. He had attacked the sacred rights of landlordism, and he was sent to a safe and distant place for quite a different offence, called " treason felony." . John Martin was a man of large property, but he devoted his life and all his income to what he considered the good of others. He had taken his B.A. degree at Trinity College, Dublin, and studied medicine, and for many years he gave advice and drugs gratuitously to all who came to him. The poor were passionately attached to him. LOVE'S SUBTERFUGES 99 I remember seeing him and speaking to him after he had received a free pardon and become a member of Parliament. No one could have looked on the fine capacious head, and the hand- some benevolent face, without questioning the system that had no better use for such a man than sending him to rot in penal servitude. Lord Palmerston beheld the ex-convict with profound admiration, and expressed deep sympathy with him as the victim of a bad system. John Martin preached and suffered for the very doctrines that Hugh Bronte enunciated with such passionate conviction. Where did he get those doctrines? I think there is no doubt that John Martin's beliefs and principles grew from seeds sown by Hugh Bronte, the servant-boy, in the sympathetic mind of his mother. Jane Harshaw, however she got them, carried the doctrines into the Martin family. They mingled with and strengthened her strong sense of duty, and they added passion to her zeal for justice and the thing that was right. With her son John the feeling of obligation to break the ban of Ireland's curse became irresistible. He was dowered with an inexhaustible grace of pity for all sufferers, and the impulse to redress the wrongs of the oppressed overpowered him, and led him to acts of impatience and imprudence which gave his cool-headed enemies the opportunity they loo THE BRONTES IN IRELAND were ready enough to embrace. But the revolu- tionary doctrines for which John Martin suffered came from the same seed that produced Charlotte Bronte's radical sentiments, and it is interesting to note that in both cases the seed produced its fruit about the same period (1847 — 1848). I must now leave these historical speculations, however plausible and probable they may be, and return to the direct narration of known facts. Hugh Bronte had disappeared for ever from the Mount Pleasant Kilns. Those who had plotted his dismissal exaggerated every foible of his life, and invented others after he was gone, until by a spiteful blending of fact and fancy they made him into a monster. The farmers' sons and servants who carted lime from Mount Pleasant to County Down brought with them wonderful tales of his misdeeds and dis- grace, and Alice McClory's guardians believed that he had disappeared for ever into the distant south whence he had emerged. They never suspected that he was actually living in their neighbourhood, and that he and Alice had met at Warrenpoint, Newcastle, and elsewhere. Under restraint Alice had drooped and pined, but now that Bronte had left the country she was permitted to ride about the neighbourhood quite alone. She enjoyed horse exercise greatly, but no matter in what direction she left home her way lay LOVE'S SUBTERFUGES loi always through Loughorne. Perhaps the roads were better in that direction, but she always exchanged salutations with a handsome working man by the expanse of water in Loughorne. When he was not about she was wont very humanely to take her horse down to the lake to drink, and from a hole in an old tree she used to remove a scrap of paper, leaving something instead. The tree used to be pointed out as " Bronte's post- box " ; but the lake has recently been drained, and the tree has, I believe, disappeared. Everything that could be done was done to please Miss McClory, but no opportunity was missed to further Farmer Burns's suit. He was a prosperous man. He had a good farm, a good house, plenty of horses and cows and pigs, and was a very desirable husband for Alice. He was also a Catholic. Bronte had shown that he did not care for her by going away and never thinking of her more. The priest joined with Alice's female friends in pleading for Burns. At length by dogged perseverance they prevailed on her to consent to marry Burns and forget Bronte. The incessant drip had made an impression at last, and the crafty relatives had gained their end. There was joy in the Catholic camp when it was publicly announced that Miss McClory and Mr. Burns were soon to be married. McClory's house was thatched anew, and whitewashed and renovated 102 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND throughout, the roses were nailed up round the windows, the street was strewn with fresh sand, new window-blinds and bed-curtains were provided, and pots and pans were burnished. Never before had McClory's house been subjected to such an outburst of sweeping and brushing and washing and scouring ; the whole place became redolent of potash and suds. It was spring-clean- ing in excelsis. The local dressmaker, Annie McCabe, whose great-granddaughter of the same name is now dress- maker of the same place, assisted by Miss McClory's female relatives, was busily engaged on the bridal dress. Burns used to look in daily on the incessant preparations, his countenance beaming with joy ; but Alice would not permit him to destroy the pleasures of imagination by approaching near to her. She would lift her finger coyly, and warn him off if he presumed on any familiarities ; but she allowed him to sit on the other side of the kitchen fire from that graced by herself At length the wedding day arrived. Such signs of feasting had never before been seen in Bally- naskeagh. New loaves had been procured from Newry, fresh beef from Rathfriland, whiskey from Banbridge ; a great pudding, composed of flour and potatoes, and boiled for many hours over a slow fire with hot coals on the lid of the oven, had been prepared ; two of the largest turkeys LOVE'S SUBTERFUGES 103 had been boiled, and laid out on great dishes, with an abundant coating of melted butter ; and a huge roll of roast beef was served up as a burnt-offering. Signs of abundance stood on table and dresser and hob, while rows of bottles peeped from behind the window curtains, and neither envy nor spite could say that Paddy McClory was not providing a splendid wedding for his sister. The morning rose glorious, and as the custom then was, Burns and his friends, mounted on their best horses, raced to the house of the bride for the brjth, first in being the winner. On such occasions crowds of neighbours crowned the hill-tops. The cavalcade was greeted with ringing cheers as it swept in a cloud of dust down the road from the Knock Hill. Several riders were unhorsed, but the steeds arrived in McClory's court champing their bits and covered with foam. A covered car from Newry stood near the house on the road to take Alice to the chapel ; but she was to ride away from the chapel mounted on the pillion behind her husband. There was an unexpected pause, no one knew why. Some dismounted, and stood by their stirrups, ready to mount when the bride had entered her carriage. Glasses of whiskey were handed round, and then the pause became more awkward and the suspense more intense. At last it became known that Alice, who had been 104 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND up nearly all night finishing her new gowns, had felt weary, and, fitting on her wedding dress, had gone out on her mare for a spurt to shake off drowsi- ness. Messengers were sent in different directions to search for her, but they had not returned. Some accident must have befallen her. Burns, who rode a powerful black horse and who had won the broth, galloped off wildly towards Loughbrickland. The other cavaliers scoured the country in different directions ; but while all kinds of surmises were being hazarded, a messenger on foot from Banbridge with dainties for the feast arrived, and reported that he had met Miss McClory and a tall gentleman galloping furiously towards the river Bann near Banbridge. There was great excitement among the wedding party, and whiskey and strong language with- out measure. After a hurried consultation the mounted guests agreed to pursue the fugitives and bring Miss McClory back ; but while they were tightening their girths and getting ready for a gallop of five or six miles, a boy rode up to the house on the mare that had been ridden by Alice, bearing a letter to say she had just been married to Hugh Bronte in Magherally Church. She sent her love and grateful thanks to her brother, hoped the party would enjoy the wedding dinner, and begged them to drink her health as Mrs. Bronte. The plucky manner in which the lady had LOVES SUBTERFUGES 105 carried out her own plan, outwitting the coercionists by her own cleverness, called forth admiration in the midst of disappointment, and the cheery message touched every heart. The calamity that had be- fallen Burns did not weigh heavily on the hearts of the guests in presence of the splendid dinner before them, and especially as it was now clear that the lady was being forced to marry him against her will. At this juncture the kind and courteous old priest rose, and with great skill and good humour talked about the events of the day. He brought into special prominence the humorous and heroic episode in a manner that appealed to the chivalry of his hearers, and then with tender pathos, referring to the beautiful daughter of the house, called upon the guests to drink her health. The toast was responded to with a hearty, ringing cheer. Burns, who has left a good reputation behind him, promptly proposed prosperity to the new married couple ; and Red Paddy, always kind and generous, promised to send the united good wishes of the whole party to the bride and bridegroom, and to assure them of a hearty welcome in which the past would be forgotten. Paddy, as we shall see, kept his word. Thus the grandfather and grandmother of the great novelists were married in 1776 in the Protestant Church of Magherally, the clergyman who officiated pronouncing the bride the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. CHAPTER XIII LOVE IN A COTTAGE . AFTER a brief honeymoon spent at Warren- point, Alice Bronte returned, on her brother's invitation, to her old home, and Hugh went back to complete his term of service in Loughorne. It soon became desirable that his wife should have a home of her own, and he took a cottage in Emdale in the parish of Drumballyroney, with which Drumgooland was united at the time The house stands near cross-roads leading to important towns. In a direct line it is about three and three-quarters statute miles from Rathfriland, seven and three-quarters from Newry, twelve from Warren point, and five and a quarter from Banbridge. The map shows the position of the house on the north-west side of the old road, leading in Hugh Bronte's day to Newry and Warrenpoint. Almost opposite on the other side of the road there was a blacksmith's shop, which still continues to be a blacksmith's shop. The Bronte house remains, though partially in ruins. I have given a photo- 106 LOVE IN A COTTAGE 109 graph of it taken from the Banbridge side. It stands as frontispiece. The house is now used as a byre, but its dimen- sions are exactly the same as when it became the home of Hugh Bronte and his bride. The rent then would be about sixpence per week, and would in accordance with the general custom be paid by one day's work in the week, the work being given in the busy seasons. The house consisted of two rooms. That over which the roof still stands was without chimney and was used as bedroom and parlour ; and the outer room, from which the roof has fallen, was used as a corn-kiln and also as kitchen and recep- tion-room. A farmer's wife, whose ancestors lived close to the Bronte house long before the Brontes were heard of in County Down, pointing to a spot in the corner of the byre opposite to the window, said, " There is the very spot where the Rev. Patrick Bronte was born." Then she added, " Numbers of great folk have asked me about his birthplace, but, och ! how could I tell them that any dacent man was ever born in such a place ! " This feeling on the part of the neighbours will probably account for the fact that everything written thus far regard- ing Patrick Bronte's birthplace is wrong, neither the townland nor even the parish of his birth being correctly given. 1 10 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND In the lowly cottage in Emdale, now known as " The Kiln," and used as a cowshed, Patrick Bronte was born on the 17th of March, 1777. Men have risen to fame from a lowly origin ; but few men have ever emerged from humbler circumstances than Patrick Bronte. Many a reader of Mrs. Gaskell's life of Charlotte Bronte has been saddened by the picture of the vicar's daughters amid their narrow and grim surroundings ; but the grey vicarage of ' Haworth was a palace compared with the hovel in which the vicar himself was born and reared. Besides, the Haworth vicarage was never really as sombre as Mrs. Gaskell painted it, for Miss Ellen Nussey was a constant visitor, and she assures me that the girls were bright and happy in their home, always engaged on some project of absorbing interest, and always enjoying life in their own sober and thoughtful way. The Bronte cottage in Emdale was very poor, but it was brightened with the perennial sun- shine of love. It was love in a cottage, in which the bare walls and narrow board were golden in the light of Alice Bronte's smile. It was said in the neighbourhood that Mrs. Bronte's smile "would have tamed a mad bull." And on her deathbed she thanked God that her husband had never looked upon her with a frown. In their wedded love they were very poor, but LOVE IN A COTTAGE iii very happy. Hugh's constant, steady work pro- vided for the daily wants of an ever-increasing family, but it made no provision for the strain of adverse circumstances. In fact, the Emdale Brontes lived like birds, and as happy as birds. Hugh Bronte was one of the industrious poor. The salt of his life was honest, manly toil. He had forgotten the luxury of his childhood's home, and he did not feel any degradation in his lowly lot. In our artificial civilisation we have come to place too much store on the accident of wealth. Our blessed Saviour, whom the rich and luxurious as well as the poor call " Lord," was born in as lowly a condition of comfortless poverty as Patrick Bronte. Cows are now housed in Bronte's birth- place, but our Lord was born among the animals in the caravanserai. And yet in our social code we have reduced the Decalogue to the one commandment, " Thou shalt not be poor." Hugh Bronte did not choose poverty as his lot, but being a working man, like the Carpenter of Nazareth, he did the daily work that came to his hand, and then side by side with Alice he found the fulness of each day sufficient for all its wants. The happy home was soon crowded with children, and the family removed to, a larger and better house in the townland of Lisnacreevy. The following verses have always been known 112 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND as the product of Hugh Bronte's muse. I am inclined to think they may have, in an original form, been produced by Hugh, and smoothed down by his son Patrick ; and perhaps in the refining process they have lost in strength more than they have gained in sound. I do not think old Hugh would have known anything at first hand of the " peach-bloom," or of " blood-red Mars.'' The poem forty years ago had many variations, but there is one line of special interest, as it shows that the verses were known to Charlotte Bronte. The verse with a slight variation is put into the mouth of Jane Eyre. Rochester says, " Jane suits me : do I suit her ? " Jane answers, " To the finest fibre of my nature, sir." "ALICE AND HUGH. " The red rose paled before the b'.ush That mantled o'er thy dimpled cheek ; The peach-bloom faded at the flush That tinged thy beauty ripe and meek. " Thy milk-white brow outshone the snow, Thy lustrous eyes outglanced the stars ; Thy cherry lips, with love aglow. Burned ruddier than the blood-red Mars. " Thy sweet, low voice waked in my heart Dead memories of my mother's love ; My long-lost sister's artless art Lived in thy smiles, my gentle dove. LOVE IN A COTTAGE 113 "Dear Alice, how thy charm and grace Kindled my dull and stagnant life ! From first I saw thy winning face My whole heart claimed thee for my wife. " I thought you'd make me happy, dear, I sought you for my very own ; You clung to me through storm and fear, You loved me still, though poor and lone. " My love was centred all in self, Thy love was centred all in me ; True wife above all pride and pelf, My life's deep current flows for thee. " The finest fibres of my soul Entwine with thine in love's strong fold, Our tin cup is a golden bowl. Love fills our cot with wealth untold." CHAPTER XIV THE DAILY ROUND HUGH BRONTE and his wife could not live wholly on love in a cottage, and Hugh had to bestir himself. He was an unskilled labourer, though he understood the art of burning lime. There was no limestone, however, in that part of County Down to burn, and as he could not have a lime-kiln he resolved to have a corn-kiln. At the beginning of this century a corn-kiln in such a district in Ireland was a very simple affair. A floor of earthenware tiles, pierced nearly through from the under side, was arranged as a kind of platform or loft. Beneath there was a furnace, which was heated by burning the rough, dry seeds, or outer shelling, which had been ground off the oats. In front of the furnace there was a hollow, called the " logie-hole," in which the kiln- man sat, with the shelling, or seeds, heaped up within arm's length around him, and with his right hand he beeked the kiln by throwing, every few seconds, a sprinkling of seeds on the flame. In this 114 THE DAILY ROUND 115 way he kept up a warm glow under the corn till it was sufficiently dry for the mill. Such was the simple character of the ordinary corn-kiln in County Down at the beginning of the century. But I have been assured, by old men of the neighbourhood, that Hugh Bronte's kiln was of a still more primitive structure. The platform, or corn-floor, was constructed by laying down iron bars across unhewn stones set up on end. On these bars straw matting was placed, and on the matting the corn was spread to dry. Such a structure was the immediate precursor of the pottery-floored kiln. The design was the same in both, but the matting was always liable to catch fire, and required careful attention. The kiln was erected in the part of the Bronte cottage now roofless, and, like the cottage itself, must have been a very humble erection. It has been suggested that the kiln may have stood elsewhere ; but it is now established beyond all doubt, by the investigations of the Rev. W. J. McCracken, and the unanimous testimony of the inhabitants, that the Bronte kiln stood in the ruined room of the BrontS cottage, and, in fact, it is known by the name of " Bronte's kiln." Within those walls, now roofless, the grandfather of Charlotte Bronte began, in 1776, to earn the daily bread of himself and his bride by roasting his neighbours' oats. His wage was known by ii6 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND the name of niutker, and consisted of so many pounds of fresh oats taken from every hundred- weight brought to him to be kiln-dried. The miller, too, was paid in kind ; but his muther was taken by measure after the shellings, or seeds, had been ground off the grain. When Hugh Bronte had accumulated a sackful of muther, he dried it on his kiln, took it to the mill, and paid his muther in turn to the miller to have it ground into meal. The meal, when taken home, was stored in a barrel, and with the produce of the rood of potatoes which Hugh had sod on his brother-in-law's farm, became the food of him- self and family. As the Brontes could not consume all the muther themselves, the surplus would be sold to provide clothing and other necessaries ; and though there remains no trace of pigsty or fowl-house around the cottage, there can be little doubt that Mrs. Bronte would have both pigs and fowl to eke out her husband's earnings. Mrs. Bronte was a famous spinner, and she handed down the art to her daughters. She had always a couple of sheep grazing on her brother's land. She carded and span the wool, her spinning-wheel singing all day beside her husband as he beeked the kiln. Then, during the long dark evenings, when they had no light but the red eye of the kiln, she knitted the yarn into hose and vests and THE DAILY ROUND 117 shirts, and even headgear, so that Hugh Bronte, like his sons in after-years, was almost wholly clad in "home-spun." This probably had something to do with the general impression, which still remains in the neighbourhood, of the stately and shapely forms of the Bronte men and women. The knitted woollen garments fitted close, unlike the fantastic and shapeless habiliments that came from the hands of the local tailors in those days. Alice Bronte also span nearly all the garments which she wore, and her tall and comely daughters after her were dressed in clothes which their own hands had taken from the fleece. From choice as well as from necessity the Brontes wore woollen garments, and the vicar carried the same taste with him to England, where his dislike of everything made of cotton was attributed by his biographer to dread of fire. The absurd servant's gossip as to his cutting up and destroying his wife's silk gown had possibly a grain of truth in it, owing to his preference for woollen garments ; but the atrocity manufactured out of the gossip by Mrs. Gaskell was probably an exaggeration of an innocent act. At any rate, the old vicar characterised the statement, I believe truly, by a small but ugly word. All the Brontes, father, mother, sons, and daughters, to the number of twelve, were clad ii8 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND in wool, and they were said to be_the " healthiest, handsomest, strongest, heartiest family in the whole country." They were a standing proof of the excellency of the woollen theory ; and it is inter- esting to note how Hugh Bronte's theory and practice have received approval in our own day. For a time the Brontes had to look to others to weave their yarn into the blankets and friezes that they required ; but Patrick was taught to weave, and then his father's household manufactured for themselves out of the raw staple everything they wore, from the drugget petticoat to the fine and gracefully-fitting corset. Even the scarlet mantle, for which " Ayles " Bronte is still remembered in Ballynaskeagh, was carded, spun, knitted, and dyed by Mrs. Bronte's own hands. The spirit of independence manifested by the Brontes in England was a survival of a still sturdier spirit that had its origin in one of the humblest cabins in County Down. As time passed Hugh Bronte became a famous ditcher. There is a very old man called Hugh Norton living in Ballynaskeagh who remembers him making fences and philosophising at the same time. It is very probable that the introduction of corn-kilns constructed of burnt pottery may have left him without custom for his straw-mat kiln, just as the introduction of machinery at a later period left the country hand-looms idle. THE DAILY ROUND 119 In Hugh Bronte's time more careful attention began to be given to the land. Bogs were drained, fields were fenced, roads constructed, bridges made, houses built, with greater energy than had ever been known before ; and although the landlord generally raised the rent on every improvement effected by the tenant, the wave of prosperity and improvement continued. Hugh Bronte was a good steady workman, and found constant employment, and at that time wages rose from sixpence per day to eightpence and tenpence. The sod fences made by him still stand as a monument of honest work, and there are few country districts where huntsmen would find greater difficulty with the fences than in Emdale and Ballynaskeagh. As Hugh Bronte advanced in life he continued to prosper. He removed, as we have said, from the Emdale cottage to a larger house in Lisna- creevy, and from there he and his family went home to live with Red Paddy, Mrs. Bronte's brother. On the Ballynaskeagh farm the children found full scope for their energies, and they continued to prosper until they were in very comfortable circumstances. The Brontes were greatly advanced in their prosperity by a discovery made by John Loudon MacAdam. He wrote several treatises on road- 120 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND making of a revolutionary character. His proposal was to make roads by laying down layers of broken stones, which he said would become hardened into a solid mass by the traffic passing over them. For a time he was the subject of much ridicule, but he persevered, and proved his theory in a practical fashion. The importance of the invention was subsequently acknowledged by a grant from the Government of ;^ 10,000, which he accepted, and by the offer of a baronetcy, which he declined. He lived to see the world's highways improved by his discovery, and the English language enriched by his name. The old, unscientific road-makers were too con- servative to engage in the construction of mac- adamised roads ; but the Brontes were shrewd enough to see the value of the new method, and they tendered for county contracts, and their tenders were accepted. Then the way to fortune lay open before them. They opened quarries on their own land, where they found an inexhaustible supply of stones easily broken to the required size. With suitable stone ready to their hands they had a great advantage over all rivals, and for a generation the macadamising of the roads in the neighbourhood was practically a monopoly in the Bronte family. 1 remember the excellent carts and horses THE DAILY ROUND 121 employed by the Brontes on the roads, and I also distinctly recollect that the names painted on the carts were spelled " Bronte," the pronunciation THE BRONTE HOME. being " Brunty," never " Prunty," as has been alleged. With the lucrative monopoly of road-making, added to their farm profits, the Brontes grew in wealth. They raised on their farm the oats and fodder required by the horses ; and as the brothers 122 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND did a large amount of the work themselves, and had nothing to purchase, the money received for road-making was nearly all profit. In those days the Brontes added field to field, until they owned a considerable tract of land, which they held from a model landlord called Sharman. That was the period at which the two- storied house, shown in the picture, was built ; and there were other houses occupied by the Brontfis from the two-storied house down to the thatched cottage. In fact, the house of Red Paddy McClory, in which Alice was born and reared, stood about half-way between the two-storied house and a cabin a little to the south of it. The foundations of the house in which Charlotte Bronte's Irish grandmother was born are still visible. Shortly after the death of old Hugh, and in the time of the Bronte prosperity, one of the brothers, called Welsh, opened a public-house in the thatched cabin referred to, and from that moment, as far as I have been able to make out, the tide of the Brontes' prosperity turned. Everything the Brontes did in those days was genuine. Their whiskey was as good in quality as their roads, and I fear it must be added that they were among the heartiest customers for their own commodities. They ceased to work on the roads, and their hard-earned money slipped through their fingers, and the public-house became the THE DAILY ROUND «23 meeting-place for the fast and wild youth of the locality. Then another brother, called William, but known Hugh Bronte's Ho. ] Paddy MPLory's Ho.| "Welsh Bronto's Ho.^ **btj Hugh'fironte D'eui'I's pining Room THE BKONTE HOMELAND. as Billy, opened on the Knock Hill another public- house, which also became a centre of demoralisation to the young men of the district, and a source of 124 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND degradation to the keeper. I remember both these pests in full force. They were much frequented by Orangemen, who, when tired of playing " The Protestant Boys," used to slake their thirst and fire their hatred of the Papishes by drinking Bronte's whiskey. In those days everybody drank. At births, at baptisms, at weddings, at wakes, at funerals, and in all the other leading incidents of life, intoxicating liquors were considered indispensable. If a man were too hot he drank, or if he were too cold he drank. He drank if he were in sorrow, and he drank when in joy. When his gains were great he drank, and he drank also when crushed by losses. The symbol of universal hospitality was the black bottle. Ministers of the gospel used to visit their people quarterly. On those visitations the mini.ster was accompanied by one of his deacons or elders. Into whatever house they entered they were immedi- ately met by the hospitable bottle and two glasses, and they were always expected to fortify them- selves with spirituous draughts before beginning their spiritual duties, and they did. As the visitors called at from twelve to twenty houses on their rounds, they must have been " unco' fu' " by the close of the day. It is interesting to remember that when the drinking habits of the country were at their height, THE DAILY ROUND 125 the temperance reformation was begun in Great Britain* by the best friend the Brontes had, the Rev. David McKee. It is of still greater interest, in our present investigation, to know that Mr. McKee was moved to the action which has resulted in the great temperance reform, by the Bronte public-houses at his door, and by the demoralisation they were creating. The little incident which has led to such momen- tous results came about in this way. The Rev. David McKee of Ballynaskeagh was the minister of the Presbyterian Church of Anaghlone. He had built his church, and he was largely inde- pendent of his congregation. One Sunday he thought fit to preach on the Rechabites. In the ' "Ireland spoke first, by the Rev. Dr. Edgar of Belfast, an able Presbyterian professor in the Theological College. He was visited in 1829 by the Rev. Joseph Penney, an Irish Presbyterian minister and old friend returned from America, who told him of what was doing there. This probably gave the start in Europe. But while Mr. Penney gave the actual start, Dr. Edgar had been prepared for it shortly before by the Rev. David McKee, a Presbyterian minister near Belfast, who preached a sermon on the Rechabites and drinking habits, which so disturbed his congregation that a crowd of them came to his house next morning requiring him to recant and apologise next Sunday. He replied by printing his sermon, which went far and wide, for his commanding talents were well known. He had taught both Edgar and Penney when boys." — The Early History of the Temperance Movement, and the Practical Lessons it Teaches us, by John M. Douglas, Esq., London. 126 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND sermon he ridiculed and denounced the drinking habits of the time. The sermon fell on the con- gregation like a thunderbolt from a cloudless sky. Blank amazement in the audience was succeeded by hot indignation. On the following morning an angry deputation from the congregation waited on Mr. McKee. He listened to them with patient courtesy while they urged that the sermon should be immediately burnt, and that an apology should be tendered to the congregation on the following Sunday. When the deputation had exhausted themselves and their subject, Mr. McKee began quietly to draw attention to the happy homes which had been desolated by whiskey, the. brilliant young men whom it had ruined, the amiable neighbours whom it had hurried into drunkards' graves ; and then he pointed to the Brontes as an example of the baneful influence of the trade on the sellers of the stuff themselves. The deputation, some of them Orangemen, were in no mood to listen to radical doctrines subversive of their time-honoured customs, and they began to threaten. Mr. McKee, who was six feet four inches high, and of great muscular power, drew himself up to his full stature, and calling to his servant, then at breakfast in the kitchen, told him to saddle his best mare, as he wished to ride in haste to Newry THE DAILY ROUND 127 to publish his sermon in time for circulation at church on the following Sunday. Then, turning to the deputation, he thanked them for their early- visit, which he hoped would bear fruit, and bowed them out of his parlour. He rode the best horse in the district, and he never drew rein till he reached the printing office in Newry, and he had the sermon ready for circu- lation on the following Sunday, and handed it himself to his people as they retired. Hundreds of thousands of copies have been since issued, and it is still in circulation. In 1798 Mr. McKee, then a youth, watched from a hill in his father's land the battle of Ballynahinch. He had in his arms at the time a little nephew, who had been left in his charge. The little nephew became the famous Dr. Edgar of Belfast, who used to boast playfully that he was " up in arms " at the battle of Ballynahinch. Mr. McKee sent a copy of The Rechabites to his eloquent nephew. Dr. Edgar read the sermon, and then rising from his seat proceeded swiftly to carry all the whiskey he had in the house into the street and empty it into the gutter. With that drink- offering Dr. Edgar inaugurated the great temper- ance reform. From Ireland he passed to Scotland, and from Scotland to England. The whole kingdom was mightily stirred, and the temperance cause has ever since continued to flourish. The 128 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND little seed, stimulated at first by the Bronte public- houses, has become a great tree, the branches of which extend to all lands. We have now seen the Brontes in the daily round of their common pursuits. In the next chapter we shall see old Hugh in the light of his Bronte genius. CHAPTER XV THE IRISH RACONTEUR, OR STORY-TELLER THE hakkawati is the Oriental story-teller, the man who, beyond all others, relieves the tedium and wearisomeness of Oriental life. I have often watched the Oriental hakkawati, seated in the centre of a large crowd, weaving stories with subtle plots and startling surprises, using pathos and passion and pungent wit, and always inter- spersing his narratives with familiar incidents, and laying on local colour to give an appearance of vraisemblance, or reality, to the wildest fancies. The' Arabian hakkawati generally tells his stories at night when the weird and wonderful are most effective. He has always a fire so arranged as to light up his countenance with a ruddy glow, so that the movements and contortions of a mobile face may add support to the narrative. He some- times proceeds slowly, stumbling and correcting himself as Disraeli used to do, as if his one great desire were to stick to the literal truth. Without any apparent effort to please, the 129 130 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND hakkawati keeps his finger on the pulse of his audience. Should they show signs of weariness, he makes them smile by some pleasantry ; and as the Arab holds that smiles and tears are in the same khurg, or wallet, he brings something of great seriousness on the heels of the fun, and works himself into a white heat of passion over it, the veins rising like cords on his forehead and his whole frame convulsed and throbbing, the rapt audience following in full sympathy with every word. I have seen the Arabs shivering and pale with terror as the hakkawati narrated the fearful deeds of some imaginary Jann ; and I have seen them feeling for their daggers, and ready to spring to their feet, to avenge some dastard act of imaginary cruelty, and a few seconds after I have seen them melted to tears at the recital of some fanciful tale of woe. I never wearied of listening to the hakkawati, or in watching the artlessness of his consummate art ; and I have always looked on him as the most interesting of all Orientals, a positive benefactor to his illiterate countrymen. Hugh Bronte was an Irish hakkawati, almost the last of an extinct race. I knew several men who had heard him when he was at his best. He would sit long winter nights in the logie-hole of his corn-kiln, in the Emdale cottage, telling stories to an audience of rapt listeners who thronged around THE IRISH RACONTEUR, OR STORY-TELLER 131 him. Mrs. Bronte plied her knitting in the outer darkness of the kitchen, for there was no light except from the furnace of the kiln, which lighted up old Hugh's face as he beeked the kiln and told his yarns. The Rev. W. McAllister, from whom I got most details as to Bronte's story-telling, had heard his father say that he spent a night in Bronte's kiln. Bronte's fame was then new. The place was crowded to suffocation. At that time he reserved a place near the fire for Mrs. Bronte, and Patrick, then a baby, was lying on the heap of seeds from which the fire was fed, with his eyes fixed on his father, and listening like the rest in breathless silence. Hugh Bronte seems to have had the rare faculty of believing his own stories, even when they were purely imaginary ; and he would sometimes conjure up scenes so unearthly and awful that both he and his hearers were afraid to part company for the night. Frequently his neighbours could not face the darkness alone after one of Hugh's gruesome stories, and lay upon the shelling seeds till day dawned. The farmers' sons of the whole neighbourhood used to gather round Bronte at night to hear his narratives, and he continued to manufacture stories of all descriptions as long as he lived. I have always understood that Hugh Bronte's 132 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND, Stories, though sometimes rough in texture, and interspersed with emphatic expletives, after the manner of the time, had always a healthy, moral bearing. As a genuine Irishman, he never used an immodest word, or by gesture, phrase, or innuendo, suggested an impure thought. On this point all my informants were unanimous. He neither used unchaste words himself, nor permitted any one to do so in his house. Tyranny and cruelty of every kind he denounced fiercely. Faithlessness and deceit always met condign punishment in his romances ; and in cases where girls had been betrayed, either the ghost of the injured woman or the devil himself in some awful form wreaked unutterable vengeance on the betrayer. Hugh Bronte was a moral teacher, and a power for good as far as his influence extended. There are still some old men living in his neighbourhood who never understood him, and who are disposed to think he was in league with the devil. It is always at his peril that any man dares to live before his time, or to leave the beaten track of the commonplace. The reformers have all without exception been mad, or worse, in the eyes of dull conservatism. Bronte dared to teach his neighbours by allowing them to see as well as hear, and those who were too stupid to understand were clever enough to denounce. By a very great THE IRISH RACONTEUR, OR STORY-TELLER 133 effort Hugh Bronte learned to read late in life. He began at Mount Pleasant, with no higher aim than that of being able to write letters to Alice McClory when he could no longer visit her. He made rapid strides in learning under the tutelage of his master's children when he lived in Loughorne, and when he went to live in Emdale he knew the sweetness and solace of a few good books ; and he had always a book on his knee, which he read by the hght of the kiln fire when he was alone. He knew the Bible, the Pilgrim's Progress, and Burns's poems well. Those were bookless days. The newspaper had not yet found its way to the people, and in a neighbourhood of mental stagnation it was something to have one man who could hold the mirror up to nature and lead his illiterate visitors into enchanted ground. Many of Hugh's stories were far removed from the region of romance ; but he had the literary art of giving an artistic touch to everything he said, which added a charm to the narration independent of the facts which he narrated. The story of his early life which I have tried to reduce to simple prose was delivered in the rhapsodic style of the ancient bards, but simple enough to be understood by the most unlettered plough-boy. And I have always understood that none of Bronte's stories were so acceptable as the plain record of his early hardships. 134 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND Mingled with all his stories shrewd maxims for life and conduct were interwoven ; but in his oration on tenant-right he broke new ground, and showed that, under different circumstances, he might have been an advanced statesman, and saved his country from unutterable woe. Hugh was superstitious, but while his super- stitious character descended to all his children, the faculty of story-telling was inherited, as far as I have been able to ascertain, by Patrick alone. All the sons and daughters talked with a dash of genius ; but I have never heard of any of them except Patrick trying to tell a story. Patrick at the age of two or three used to lie on the warm shelling seeds, and listen to his father's entrancing stories as if he understood what was being said, and he seems to have caught some- thing of his father's gift and power. Miss Nussey has often told me of Patrick's power to rivet the attention of his children, and awe them with realistic descriptions of simple scenes. All the girls used to sit in breathless silence, their pro- minent eyes starting out of their heads, while their father unfolded lurid scene after scene ; but the greatest effect was produced on Emily, whcT seemed to be unconscious of eveiything else except her father's story, and sometimes the de- scriptions became so vivid, intense, and terrible, that they had to implore him to desist. THE IRISH RACONTEUR, OR STORY-TELLER 135 Miss Nussey had opportunities for observing the Bronte girls that no other person had. She became Charlotte's friend at school when both were home- sick and needed friends. She continued to be her fast friend through life. Gentle Annie Bronte died in her arms, and she was Charlotte's true consoler when the heroic Emily passed swiftly away. She early discovered the ring of genius in Charlotte's letters, and preserved every scrap of them, and it is chiefly through those letters that the Brontes are known in England. She was Charlotte's confidante in all private transactions and love matters, and she might have been a nearer friend still had Charlotte not refused an offer of marriage from her brother, an incident in the novelist's life here for the first time, I believe, made public. Miss Nussey was not only Charlotte's devoted friend, but she was a constant visitor at Haworth, and a keen observer. She had a great power of discernment in literary matters, and a very con- siderable literary gift herself She had not to wait tiW Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were published to learn that Charlotte and Emily were endowed with genius. We owe it to her penetrating sagacity that we know so much of the vicar's daughters. She watched their growth of intellect, and every- thing that ministered to it, and she believes firmly that the girls caught their inspiration from their 136 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND father, and that Emily got not only her inspiration, but most of her facts from her father's narratives * " The dirty, ragged, black-haired child " brought home by Mr. Earnshaw from Liverpool is none other than the real dirty, naked, black-haired foundling discovered on the boat between Liverpool and Drogheda, and taken home by Charlotte's great- great-grandfather and Tgrgat-great-grandmother to the banks of the Boyne. The artist, however, is not a mere copyist, and hence, while the story starts from * Swinburne, in his Note on Charlotte Bronte, says: " Charlotte evidently never viforked so well as when painting more or less directly from nature. ... In most cases probably the design begun by means ot the camera was transferred for completion to the canvas.'' In contrasting Charlotte with her sister, he says: "Emily Bronte, like William Blake, would probably have said, or at least pre- sumably have felt, that such study after the model was to her impossible — an attempt but too certain to diminish her imaginative insight, and disable her creative hand." Surely the highest imaginative insight and deftest creative hand work from the model, nature, though the result may not be a mere portrait of the model ! No author has so narrowly missed understanding Emily Bronte's character as Miss A Mary F. Robinson. In her book Emily Bronte, one of the " Eminent Women " Series, she declares that, "While the West Riding has known the prototype of nearly every person and nearly every place in Jane Eyre and Shirley, not a single character in Wuthering Heights ever climbed the hills round Haworth." Here Miss Robinson was on the way to the mystery, and she comes still nearer to it when she narrates how the Rev. Patrick Bronte used to "entertain the baby Emily with his Irish tales of violence and horror." She turned her back on THE IRISH RACONTEUR, OR STORY-TELLER 137 existing frxts and follows the general outline of the real, it is not the very image of the real, and makes deviations from the original facts to meet the exigencies of art. There is no difficulty in recognising the original of the " incarnate fiend " Heathcliffe in the man Welsh who tormented Hugh Bronte, Patrick's father, in the old family home near Drogheda. Had Welsh never played the demon among the the truth, however, when she gave currency to the silly theory that Emily, in Wuthering Heights, was simply making printer's copy of her brother's shame, "a chart of proportions by which to measure, and to which to refer, for correct investiture, the inspired idea." Nor was Miss Robinson altogether innocent in placing such a stigma on the memory of Emily Bronte, for she writes, " Emily cared more for fairy tales, wild, unnatural, strange fancies, suggested, no doubt, in some degree by her father's weird Irish stories. . . . Mr. Bronte loved to relate fearful stories of superstitious Ireland, or barbarous legends of the rough dwellers in the moors. . . . Emily, familiar with all the wild stories of Haworth for a century back, and nursed on grisly Irish horrors, tales of 1798, tales of oppression and misery, — Emily, with all this eerie lore at her finger-ends, would have the less difficulty in combining and working the separate motives into a consistent whole." It is a pity that an excellently written book has been vitiated by an unworthy hypothesis. Miss Nussey, from whom Miss Robinson got most of her information, gave no counte- nance to her theory. Emily Bronte never looked on her brother with a frown. The more commonplace Charlotte sulked and complained ; but no word of reproach ever passed Emily's lips, and no power in the universe could have drawn from her one syllable of censure for thoughtless gossip to work upon. 138 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND Brontes, Emily Bronte had never placed on canvas Heathcliffe, " child neither of Lascar nor gipsy, but a man's shape animated by demon life — a ghoul, an afreet." Nelly Dean, the benevolent but irresolute medium of romance and tragedy, is Hugh's Aunt Mary, clear-eyed as to right and duty, but ever slipping down before the force of circumstances. And old Gallagher on the banks of the Boyne, with the " Blessed Virgin and all the saints " on his side, is none other than the original of the old hypo- crite Joseph. Gallagher is Joseph speaking the Yorkshire dialect. And Edgar Linton is the gentle and forgiving brother of Alice, our friend Red Paddy McClory, who took his sister home after her runaway marriage with a Protestant, and finally took the whole Bronte family under his roof and gave them all he possessed. Even Isabella Linton's flight and marriage had solid foundation in fact, either in Alice Bronte's romantic elopement with Hugh, or in the more tragic circumstances of Mary Bronte's marriage With Welsh. It is not credible, I again assert, that Patrick Bronte in his story-telling moods never narrated to his listening daughters the romance of their grandfather and grandmother. It is true Miss Nussey never heard any reference to the story nor did the Brontes ever in her presence refer to THE IRISH RACONTEUR, OR STORY-TELLER 139 their Irish home or friends or history, though at the very time she was visiting Haworth they were in constant communication with their Irish relatives, and, as we shall see, one of the uncles actually visited them as Charlotte's champion, and one of them had visited Haworth at an earlier date. The Brontes were too proud to talk even to their most intimate friends of their Irish home, much less to expose the foibles of their immediate ancestors to phlegmatic English ears ; but Patrick Bronte would not omit to tell his daughters the thrilling adventures of their ancestors ; and the girls, having brooded over the incidents, reproduced them in variant forms, and in the sombre setting of their own surroundings. The originals lived and died, acted and were acted upon in Louth and Down ; but on the steeps of Wuthering Heights they strut again, speaking with the Yorkshire brogue and braced by the tonic air of the northern downs. None of the stories betray their origin so clearly as Wuthering Heights, just as none of the novelists were so fascinated with their father's tales as Emily. But the stories are all Bronte stories, an echo of the thrilling narratives related by old Hugh, and retold to his children, I believe, a hundred times by Patrick. Of course all the stories are made to live again 140 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND under new forms, each writer giving the stamp of her own character to the new creations, and each adding the necessary rouge which fiction requires to make up for fact. Artists of the Bronte stamp are not portrait painters nor mere reproducers. They never were content to be mere lackeys of nature. They were above nature, and everything without and within themselves they placed under contribu- tion. Even the rough and rugged characters that have come from the hands of Emily show the work of the artist. She added to the repulsive Heath- cliffe qualities of her own. She is perfectly serious when she puts into Lockwood's mouth the following words : " Possibly, some people might suspect him (Heathcliffe) of a degree of underbred pride. 1 have a sympathetic chord within that tells me it is nothing of the sort. I know, by instin.ct, his reserve springs from an aversion to showy displays of feeling, — to manifestations of mutual kindliness. He'll love and hate equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again. No : I'm running on too fast ; 1 bestow my own attributes over liberally on him." Knowing the model from which Emily Bronte worked, there are few passages that throw more light on the artist than this. Catherine Linton was modelled on the lovely Alice McClory, who bequeathed to her clever THE IRISH RACONTEUR, OR STORY-TELLER 141 granddaughters all the personal attractions they possessed ; but here again Emily bestows attributes of herself and sisters on her stately and lily-like grandmother : — " She (Catherine) was slender, and apparently scarcely past girlhood : an admirable form, and the most exquisite little face that I have ever had the pleasure of beholding ; small features, very fair ; flaxen ringlets, or rather golden, hanging loose on her delicate neck ; and eyes, had they been agreeable in expression, that would have been irresistible." The picture is neither that of a Bronte of the Haworth vicarage, nor is it a portraiture of the flower plucked in Ballynaskeagh by Hugh Bronte ; but it is Alice McClory diluted with an infusion of the Penzance Branwells, and the effect is a perfect and beautiful picture, more pleasing indeed than a lifelike portrait with all the radiant beauty of the charming Alice when she rode off to Magherally Church with the dashing Hugh Bronte. CHAPTER XVI HUGH BRONTE AS A TENANT-RIGHTER HUGH BRONTE worked up to his tenant- right doctrines by a series of assertions, negative and positive, on religious, political, and economic questions. His address in which he set forth his views on such matters, approximated to the form of a lecture more nearly than any of his other talks, which were generally in the narrative form. The following are the chief points of the discourse as given to me by my old tutor and friend, and the propositions were never varied, except in the mere wording, although the state- ment had never, I believe, except by myself, been formally written out. Hugh Bronte always began with a little black Bible in his hand or on his knee, and his first negative assertion was : — I. The Church is not Christ's. Laying his hand on the little book he would declare that he found grace in the Bible, but in the Church only greed. Once, and only once, he had appealed to a parson. He was hungry, naked, 142 HUGH BRONTE AS A TENANT-RIGHTER 143 and bleeding ; but the great double-chinned, red- faced man had looked on him as if he were a rat, and without hearing his story had him driven off by a grand-looking servant in livery, who cracked a whip over his head and swore at him. In Hugh Bronte's eyes the parsons got their livings for political services, and not for learning or goodness. Enormous sums were paid to them to do work that they did not do. They rarely visited their parishes, and their duties were per- formed by hungry and ill-paid curates. When they did return occasionally to their livings, they were heard of at banquets, where they ate and drank too freely, and at other resorts, where they gambled recklessly. They were seen riding over the country after foxes and hounds, and sitting in judgment on the men whose grain they had trampled down, and sending them to penal servi- tude for trapping hares in their own gardens. They were said to be ignorant, but they were known to be immoral, irreligious, arrogant, and cruel. They acted as the ministers of the gentry, before whom they were very humble ; and they utterly despised the people who paid for their luxuries and supported their own priests besides. They gave the sanction of the Church to violence, craft, and crime in high places, and they were as far removed as men could be, in origin, position, and practice, from the Apostles of the 144 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND , New Testament. And yet, he added, they claimed in the most haughty manner that they, and they alone, were the successors of the Apostles, although they showed no signs of apostolic spirituality or apostolic service. Hugh Bronte declared that he could not submit to the Protestant parson who despised him because he was poor, and could not aid in his promotion ; nor could he yield obedience to the Catholic priest who demanded utter subjection and prostration of both body and mind, and enforced his Church's claims by a stout stick. With these views it is not to be wondered at that Hugh Bronte did not belong to any Church. ■ To us now, who know the high character of the Irish clergy, his statements appear exaggerated and sweeping ; but it must be remembered that he spoke of them generally, in the closing decades of the last century. He expressed himself fiercely regarding the parsons, and in return they dubbed him atheist. His second negative assertion was : — n. The World is not God's. He knew from the Bible that God had made all things very good, and that He loved the world ; but he held that a number of people had got in between God and His world and made it very bad and hateful. They were known as kings and emperors and rulers, and they had seized on the HUGH BRONTE AS A TENANT-RIGHTER 145 world by fraud and force. They lived on the best of everything that the land produced, and when they disagreed among themselves they sent their people to kill each other on their account, while they sat at home in peace and luxury. These usurpers not only held sway over the possessions and lives of men, but they decreed the very thoughts men were to entertain concerning God, and the exact words they were to speak regarding Him, and when men presumed to obey God rather than men they were tied to stakes and burnt to death as blasphemers. For such senti- ments as these Hugh Bronte was denounced as a socialist, a very bad and dangerous name at the beginning of the present century. His third negative proposition was : — HI. Ireland is not the King's. He understood that King George HI. was not a wise man, but that he was a humane man. Ireland was not governed by King George III., but by a gang of rapacious brigands. They constantly in- voked the King's name, but only to serve more fully their own selfish ends.- By the King's authority they carried out their policy of systematic outrage, until he hated the very name of the King whom he always wished to love. The chief business of the King's representatives was to plunder His Majesty's poorer subjects. For this purpose the country was parcelled out, and 146 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND divided among a number of base and greedy adventurers in return for odious services. Each of these adventurers became petty king, or landlord, in his own district, and lived on the wretched natives. Every meskin of butter made on the farm, every pig reared in the cabin, every egg laid by the hens that roosted in the kitchen went to support the landlord-king. The cottages were mud hovels ; the land was bog and barren waste ; the men and women were in rags ; the children were hungry, pinched, and barefooted. But the landlord carried off every- thing except the potato crop, which was barely sufficient to sustain life. The landlord was a very great man. He lived in London near the King in more than royal splendour, or he passed his time in some of the great cities of Europe, spending as much on gay women as would have clothed and fed all the starving children on his estate. In English society his pleasantries were said to be most entertaining regarding the poverty, misery, and squalor of his tenants whom he fleeced ; but he took care never to come near them, lest his fine sensibilities should be shocked at their condition. His serious occupation was the making of laws to increase his own power for rapacity, and to take away from the people every vestige of right that they might have inherited. HUGH BRONTE AS A TENANT-RIGHTER 147 " The landlord takes everything, and gives nothing," was Hugh Bronte's simple form of the fine modern phrase regarding landlords' privileges and duties. Hugh Bronte maintained that the landlord was a courteous gentleman, graced with polished manners, and that if he had lived among his people he might in time have developed a heart. At least, he could hardly have kept up a gentlemanly indifference in the presence of squalor and misery. But he kept quite out of sight of his tenantry, or he could hardly have made so much merriment about the pig which was being brought up among the children to pay for his degrading extravagances. The landlord's place among the people was taken by an agent, an attorney, and a sub-agent. The agent was a local potentate whose will was law ; the attorney's business was to make the law square with the agent's acts ; and the under-agent was employed to do mean and vile and inhuman acts that neither the agent nor the attorney could conveniently do. The duty of the three was to find out by public inspection and by private espionage the uttermost farthing the tenants could pay, and extract it from them legally. In getting the landlord's rent each got as much as he could for himself. The key of the situation was the word " eviction." Then Hugh told the story of his ancestors' farm. 148 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND The Brontes had occupied a piece of forfeited land, with well-defined obligations to a chief or landlord. Soon the landlord succeeded in re- moving all legal restraints which in any way interfered with his absolute control of the place. Remonstrance and entreaty were alike unavailing. The alterations in title were made by the authority of George III., by the grace of God King of England, etc. Hugh's grandfather drained the bog and im- proved the land at enormous expense. Every improvement was followed by a rise in the rent. His grandfather built a fine house on the land by money made in dealing, and again the rent was raised on the increased value given to the place by the tenant's improvements. Then the' vilest creature in human form having ingratiated himself with the agent by vile services, the place was handed over to him, without one farthing of com- pensation to the heirs of the man whose labour had made the place of value. All these things were done in the name of George HI., though the King had no more to do with the nefarious transactions than the child unborn. From this conclusion Hugh Bronte proceeded to his fourth negative proposition : — IV. Irish Law is not Justice. He expressed regret that he was unable to respect the laws of the country. According to HUGH BRONTE AS A TENANT-RIGHTER 149 his views the laws were made by an assembly of landlords purely and solely to serve their own rapacious desires, and not in accordance with any dictates of right and wrong. As soon might the lambs respect the laws of the wolves as the people of Ireland respect the laws of the landlords. From this point he naturally arrived at his fifth negative proposition : — V. Obedience to Law is not a Duty. He said it might be prudent to obey a bad law cruelly administered, because disobedience might entail inconvenient consequences ; but there was no moral obligation impelling a man to obey a law which outraged decency, and against which every righteous and generous instinct revolted. Human laws should be the reflection of Divine laws ; but the landlord-made laws of Ireland had neither the approval of honest men nor the sanction of Divine justice. Hugh's sixth and last negative proposition was : — VI. Patriotism is not a Virtue. He held that every man should love his country, and that every Irishman did ; but he could not do violence to the most sacred instincts of his nature by any zeal to uphold a system of government- which dealt with Ireland as the legitimate prey of plunderers. In other lands men were patriotic because they ISO THE BRONTES IN IRELAND loved their country. He loved his country too well to be a patriot. Love of country more than, any other passion had prompted to the purest patriotism ; but who would do heroic acts to main- tain a swarm of harpies to pollute and lacerate his country? who would have his zeal aglow to maintain the desolators of his native land ? Hugh Bronte gave out his views with a warmth that betrayed animus arising from personal injury. He was therefore declared to be disloyal, and that at a time when there was danger in disloyalty. About the time Hugh Bronte was enunciating these sentiments the rising of the United Irishmen took place, and the pitched battle of Ballynahinch was fought in 1798. It has always seemed to me strange that he should have passed through those times in peace, for the " Welsh Horse " devastated the country far and wide after the battle, and hundreds of inno- cent people were shot down like dogs. Besides, William, his second son, was a United Irishman and present at the battle of Ballynahinch. After the battle he was pursued by cavalry, who fired at him repeatedly, but he led them into a bog and escaped. Hugh Bronte lived in a secluded glen ; but the " Welsh Horse " visited his house, and after a short parley with his wife, in which neither understood the other, one of the soldiers struck a light into HUGH BRONTE AS A TENANT-RICHTER 151 the thatch. Hugh suddenly appeared, and spoke to the Welsh soldiers in Irish, which it was supposed they understood as being akin to their own language, and they joined heartily with him in extinguishing the flames. They joined still mpre heartily with Hugh in disposing of his stock of whiskey. The inability of Hugh's neighbours to communicate with the Welsh may account for the fact that a man well known for such advanced and disloyal views passed safely through those troublous times. Having completed his negative assertions or paradoxes, Hugh Bronte proceeded to state his theories, or positive conclusions. He laid it down as an axiom that justice must be at the root of all good government, and he declared emphatically, what O'Connell and agent Townsend have since maintained, that the Irish were the most justice- loving people in the world. He also held that unjust laws were the fruitful source of nearly all the turbulence and crime in Ireland. Justice, he said, was nothing very grand. It meant simply that every man should have his own by legal right. This definition brought him to his tenant-right theory. In illustration he returned to the story of his ancestral home and the wrongs of his ancestors. He maintained that when his forefathers drained the bog and improved the land, they were entitled to every ounce of improvement 152 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND they had made. The landlord had done nothing for the land. He never went near it, and had never spent one farthing upon it; and he should not have been entitled to confiscate to his own profit the additional value given it by the labour of others. He further declared that a just and wise legisla- tion should secure to every man, high and low, the fruits of his own labour ; and he maintained that such simple natural justice would produce con- fidence in Ireland, and that confidence would beget content and industry, and that a contented and industrious people would soon learn to love both King and country, and make Ireland happy and England strong. Just laws would silence the agitator and the blunderbuss, and range the people on the side of the rulers. Hugh Bronte preached his revolutionary doctrine of simple justice in the cheerless east wind ; but a little seed, carried I know not how, took root in genial soil, and the revolutionary doctrine of "Every man his own" at which the political parsons used to cry " Anathema " and the short-sighted politicians used to shout "Con- fiscation," has become one of the commonplaces of the modern reformation programme of fair play. The doctrine of common honesty enunciated by Hugh Bronte has lately received the approval of HUGH BRONTE AS A TEN ANT-RIGHT ER 153 Liberal and Conservative governments in what is known as " Tenant-right," or the " Ulster Custom." And here it is interesting to note that Hugh Bronte was a tenant on the estate which came into the possession of Sharman Crawford,*a landlord who first took up the cause of Irish tenant-right, and after spending a long life in its advocacy bequeathed its defence to his sons and daughters. The Crawfords, like the Johnsons and Sharmans, their predecessors in title, were never absentee- landlords, and as men of high Christian character they always took a personal interest in their tenants, and would not, I believe, have failed to note any special intellectual activity among them. It is certain, moreover, that the Sharman Craw- fords, father and son in succession, spent their lives largely in the propagation of Hugh Bronte's views, both in the House of Commons and throughout the country ; and it seems to me not only probable and possible, but morally certain, that Bronte's * I knew the late W. Sharman Crawford, M.P., well ; and I once talked with him of Hugh Bronte's tenant-right theories, of which he was thoroughly aware. I did not ask him if his father had got his views from Bronte, as I had no doubt of the fact. Miss M. Sharman Crawford writes me : " My father certainly originated tenant-right as a public question, though no doubt, long before the period when he strove to amend the position of Irish tenants, many thoughtful minds like his must have protested against the legalised injustice to which they were subject." IS4 THE BRONTES IN IRELAND eloquent and passionate arguments dropped into the justice-loving minds of the Crawfords, and were the primary seeds of the great agrarian harvest which, on the lines of equity and with the full sanction of the legislature, is now being reaped by the tenant farmers in Ireland.* Great results have thus flowed from the inhuman treatment of a child. Had little Bronte been left in the luxury of his father's home, it is not likely he would ever have been shaken up to original and inde- pendent thought ; but the iron of cruel wrong had entered into his soul, and he felt that all was not well. He owed no gratitude to the existing order of things, and had no compunction in denouncing it ; and having thought out and formulated a new * In 1833 W. Sharman Crawford published a pamphlet embodying Hugh Bronte's doctrines, and making additional suggestions for the good government of Ireland. The pamphlet was republished by Dr. W. H. Dodd, Q.C., in 1892. Sergeant Dodd is an old pupil of the Ballynaskeagh school. He received his early education from Mr. McKee, the friend of the Brontes, and he was acquainted as a student with Charlotte Bronte's uncles. The following is his summary of the political portion of the pamphlet : — " Mr. Crawford anticipates, as the probable result of refusing self-government to Ireland, the growth of secret societies, the influence of agitation, and the necessity of resorting to force in the government of the country. He touches upon the question of private bill legislation, of a reform of the grand jury system of county government. " He points out that the creation of county councils without having a central body to control them is not desirable. And HUGH BRONTE AS A TENANT-RIGHTER 155 theory, he proclaimed it with the strong conviction of an apostle who sees salvation in his gospel alone. The daring character of Hugh Bronte's specu- lations in their paradoxical form, combined with the fierce energy of his manner in making them, secured for him an audience and an amount of consideration to which as an uneducated working man he could have had no claims. Indeed, Hugh Bronte's revolutionary doctrines were known far beyond his own immediate neighbourhood ; and while many said he was mad, some declared that he only saw a little clearer than his contem- poraries. lie suggests the creation of a local legislature for Irish affairs, combined with representation in the Imperial Parliament, as the true method of preserving the Union, as the surest bond of the connection between the two countries, and as essentially necessary to tranquillity in Ireland. "He refers, among other measures, to the disestablishment of the Irish Church, and the reform of the relations between landlord and tenant as being pressing. " The arguments against his views are met and answered. One would think he had read some of the speeches lately delivered, so apt is his reply. " It is curious to note the length of time Ireland has had to wait for the reforms he thought urgent ; and it is sad to reflect how much suffering has been endured, and how much blood has been shed, because the men of his time would not listen to his words." CHAPTER XVII THE BRONTE FAMILY : GENEALOGICAL IT is desirable here, at the risk of repetition, to take a general survey of the Bronte family before proceeding to specific details regarding the different members. Shortly after the events which in 1688 rendered the Boyne memorable, Hugh Bronte (i) the elder occupied, as we have already seen, a house and farm on the banks of that river. It is not impro- bable that he received his possession for imperial services rendered in those turbulent times. As we have also already seen, disaster befell Bronte's children through the artifices of the found- ling called Welsh, who had been brought up in the family. He was supposed to have murdered and robbed old Hugh, and he finally possessed himself of his farm and of his youngest daughter, Mary. The rest of the family were scattered abioad and disappeared ; but a young Hugh (2), a son of one of the dispersed brothers, came to live with his aunt Mary and her husband Welsh, who had assumed the name of Bronte. 156 THE BRONTE FAMILY: GENEALOGICAL 157 This young Hugh was the grandson of the Hugh Bronte whom we first met by the banks of the Boyne, and he became the grandfather of the famous novehsts. He had a son, Hugh (3). "the Giant." Hugh, having escaped from Welsh's bondage, THE LAST OF THE BRONTiS AUNTS. married AHce McClory of Ballynasl