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 traveling 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.
Hugh's thoughts were not in his business. He had made several Sunday
journeys to Ballynaskeagh, to have secret meetings with Alice. They
met in the grove by the brook, in a spot still pointed out as the
"Lovers' Arbor" or "Courting Bower," and there, under willows
festooned with ivy and honeysuckle and sweetbriers, they spent lonely
but happy Sundays.
They were at last betrayed by a Catholic servant who had been
intrusted with a message 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 neighbor,
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.
Like many other professions, a lime-kiln is a jealous mistress, and
requires constant attentions. Young Bronte brought to it a divided
mind, and gave it the second place in his thoughts. He was constantly
leaving the kilns in the care of a companion on Saturday evenings and
making long journeys to see Alice, returning on Monday morning, after
a fatiguing night's journey. At first his companions did all they
could to make up for his absence and absent-mindedness; but a change
came, and they did their best to throw the light of exaggeration on
his deficiencies.
News had reached them from the North 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 a New Testament that he was
learning to read.
A plot was immediately hatched to get rid of so dangerous a colleague.
One of the Catholics undertook, as usual, to look after the kilns
while he made an expedition to County Down; but he not only failed to
charge the kilns properly, but he 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 that there was nothing for
them but unburnt lime. 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 immediately after his
dismissal, but he must have been reduced to considerable straits, for
he went to the hiring ground in Newry, and engaged himself, as a
common servant-boy, to a farmer who resided in Donoughmore. As a farm
laborer in those days he would receive about six pounds 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 respectable family. In the Harshaw
home shrewd and steady industry was brightened by culture and
refinement. The wheel of fortune had brought Hugh Bronte into a family
where mental alacrity had full play.
Bronte seems to have been treated with consideration and kindness by
the Harshaws, who probably recognized in him something superior to the
ordinary farm servant. At any rate, in those days the walls of class
distinction were not raised so high as they are 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 also 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 proprietor 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."[1]
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 with gratitude and
affection, and I do not believe he could have been so glad and happy
without contributing to the general enjoyment.
In the latter part of last century, the _raconteur_ occupied the place
in Ireland now taken by the modern novelist, and I believe Hugh Bronte
dropped doctrines into the minds of the young Harshaws which produced
far-reaching results. Such was the fixed conviction of my old teacher,
the Reverend W. McAllister.
It happened that the Martins, another ancient family, lived quite near
to the Harshaws. The land of the two families enclosed Loughorne
round. The Martins were rich and slightly aristocratic, 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 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 sense of
Christian duty. Her life was given for others, and, at her funeral,
the Reverend S. J. Moore said: "She was a woman who knew her duty and
did it."
Her second son, John Martin, inherited his mother's great mental
capacity and strong sense of duty. At school, in Newry, he met young
John Mitchel, 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 Mitchel 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 ferocity 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._" (Isaiah, 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 medicine gratuitously
to all who came to him. The poor were passionately attached to him.
I remember seeing him and speaking to him once, after he had received
a free pardon, and become a member of parliament. No one could have
looked on the great, capacious head, and the handsome, 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 have a profound belief, though I have no positive
proofs, that John Martin's beliefs and principles grew from seeds sown
by Hugh Bronte, the servant boy. In this belief the Reverend W.
McAllister and the Reverend David McKee shared, or, rather, my faith
has grown from their convictions.
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 lust after 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 were ready enough to
embrace. But the revolutionary 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 forever 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
disgrace. And Alice McClory's guardians believed that he had
disappeared forever into the distant South, from whence he had
emerged. They never suspected that he was actually living in their
neighborhood, and that he and Alice had met at Warrenpoint, Newcastle,
and elsewhere.
[1] As we shall see, the parish records of Hugh's marriage and
Patrick's baptism are both lost, and though Patrick was
schoolmaster in Glascar Presbyterian school, and in Drumgooland
Episcopalian school, he has left no permanent record behind him
in either place. Records in those days were ill-kept.