Chapter III: 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 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.