IN M. PASTEUR’S WORKSHOP.
I crossed the lawn and entered a large waiting-room occupying the middle of the building devoted to laboratory work. The room is flooded with light, seated with benches, and decorated with no other ornaments than a series of photographs of the Pasteur Institute at Rio Janeiro, two great maps on which are marked the cities where institutions similar to this at Paris are to be found, and cards containing certain rules applicable to patients coming for treatment against hydrophobia. Among these latter the important ones are that the treatment is gratuitous, that each patient must bathe before coming for inoculation, that board and lodging are not furnished, and that the grateful may, if they wish, leave a gift at the end of their term of treatment.
There were sixty or seventy persons in the room. They had come to be vaccinated against hydrophobia. They were of the greatest contrast in age, in condition, in culture. Beside a shrivelled, leather-brown Arab woman from the desert was a pink and white little miss from London. A young man with the refined face, correct dress and distinguished manners of a gentleman sat beside a huge and none-too-clean German laborer. As a rule, it was a friendly, cheerful company. It was only here and there that one saw a person who seemed conscious 332 that in his veins a hideous poison was at work. Most of them took it for granted that their cure was certain. Some of them scoffed at the nonsense of going to the trouble of being vaccinated.
A dignified liveried servant entered, calling “Attention.” The company bestirred itself and disappeared. I made my way to the inoculating room.
The operation of inoculating for hydrophobia is founded on the theory that if an “attenuated” microbe, that is a microbe so treated that its power of doing harm has been reduced to a low degree, is introduced into a body, it will produce an indisposition which is not itself serious, but which is sufficient to render the body proof against attacks of the original microbe.
Now M. Pasteur has discovered that it is possible to so treat a microbe that its power of evil is of any degree; that is, to “exalt” as well as to “attenuate” it. Having these microbes of varying strengths he invented a method of graduated vaccination; that is, by beginning with a virus of low degree, and increasing each day the strength of the virus, an operator arrives at a point where he can vaccinate a body with a virus stronger than there is any danger of its ever being exposed to in nature. He thus secures lasting immunity.
Thus, in vaccinating against rabies, the patient is treated first with a weak virus; this is followed by one more powerful, and so on, until at the end a highly “exalted” one is injected safely.
M. PASTEUR AT THIRTY.
It is this treatment which is practised daily at the Pasteur Institute, in the inoculation room where I found myself.
Gathered in a kind of pen formed by a little fence were three members of the institution: a secretary, whose business it is to keep track of the number of persons to be treated with each particular virus; an assistant, who has prepared the virus for the day’s use; twelve small wine glasses of cloudy liquid protected by small paper funnels; and, by a table, the inoculator. The roll was called and a half dozen men entered the room. They were to be inoculated with a virus of the lowest strength, most of them for the first time. They showed a bewildered and comic embarrassment as the attendant directed them to bare the hypogastrium. The embarrassment changed to a momentary look of distress as they felt their arms pinned behind their backs, and the sharp needle injected a syringeful of virus into the delicate flesh. The first class of men and boys passed out, and the women and little children entered. They were succeeded by a second class, and so on until all had been treated.
The simplicity of the operation seemed out of proportion to the horror of the disease. I remembered the shrugs I had seen and the doubts I had heard expressed over the treatment. “It is not sure yet.” “It does not always work; such-a-one died, you know.” “They have not found the microbe either.” My faith was shaking. Evidently I must see Doctor Roux.
On the second floor of the building I found the office and private laboratory 333 of the under-director of the Pasteur Institute, a man whose researches in connection with Pasteur, whose devotion in the cholera mission in Egypt in 1883, and whose independent investigations on diphtheria, have made him famous in the medical world. The office was small, and it had something of the attraction of a curio shop. There was none of the precision of the man of small affairs here. It was the confusion of the man of big affairs, who cannot endure to have his things meddled with. Over a table where culture tubes, blow-pipes, virus glasses and bottles filled with suspicious-looking fluids were scattered promiscuously around a valuable microscope, hung a gem of a painting—a dashing charge of cavalry. Beside a case of books, and partly concealing a fine portrait of Pasteur, hung the gray-white laboratory blouses of M. Roux. Under an exquisite etching askew in a corner stood a cage of brown-and-white guinea-pigs, martyrs to science, probably.
AT THE JUBILEE OF M. PASTEUR. THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC WELCOMING M. PASTEUR IN THE AMPHITHEATRE OF THE OLD SORBONNE.
Curiosity was cut short, for a quick step was heard in the outer room, and Doctor Roux entered. A slight figure, bent a little from a life spent over books, tubes and microscopes, but tingling to the finger-tips with nervous energy; a face a little pale, but fresh in color; brown hair and beard, glowing brown eyes, perhaps forty years—such is this eminent associate of Pasteur. As he runs over the pile of letters cut and awaiting him, he talks.
“So you have just seen the inoculation? Do I believe it a sure cure?” The doctor lays down his letters as he repeats the latter question in an astonished tone. “Of course I do. There is nothing surer in medical science. Look at these figures.” He rises and draws out from the midst of a pile of papers a big black serviette, fumbles for a moment among the documents it contains, and pulls out the latest report made by the Institute on the results of vaccination for hydrophobia, that for 1891.
“Now listen to these figures. In 1886 the Pasteur made its first report: 2,671 persons were vaccinated that year against hydrophobia; 25 of them died—.94 of one per cent. In 1887, 1,770 persons were treated; 13 died—.73 of one per cent. In 1888, 1,622 were treated; 9 died—.55 of one per cent. In 1889, 1,830 were treated; 7 died—.38 of one per cent. In 1890, 1,540 were treated; 5 died—.32 of one per cent. In 1891, 1,559 were treated; 3 died—.19 of one per cent. You notice each year the per cent. of deaths has been lower. In the six years the treatment has been reported, we average just about one-half of one per cent of loss. Tell me where you find a treatment surer?”
“But you have not found the microbe?”
“Humph! that does not prevent the method working. It is aggravating not to have found him. It prevents, possibly, the simplification of the inoculation process. Nevertheless it works. So does vaccination for small-pox. We do not know the microbe of small-pox. There is much we do not know yet. Remember, too, that it was only in 1880 that M. Pasteur made up his mind to begin an exhaustive study of hydrophobia, and that all he foresaw at first was the possibility of vaccinating dogs 334 against rabies, and that it was only in 1885 that the first person, little Joseph Meister, was inoculated, after a council of physicians had decided that his death was certain, and that his life was saved.”
PORTRAITS OF M. PASTEUR.
BY LAFON.
BUST BY P. DUBOIS.
BY BONNAT.
BY A. EDELFALT.
The newness of the Pasteur doctrines and treatment is, indeed, one of the most striking things about the Institute. One rubs his eyes to remember that, thirteen years ago, very few people admitted the rôle of bacteria in the world, and that those who did admit their existence were very much at sea about what to do with them.
The doctrine of microbe, the theory that ferments and virus are living beings, that a vaccine is an attenuated virus, that medicine is based on the artificial attenuation of virus—all this is now so widely received, is so thoroughly a part of popular belief, that one is bewildered in remembering that twelve years ago the general theory of disease was that it is “in us, from us, by us.” Especially is all this astonishing, standing in the Pasteur Institute, the crystallization of the microbe doctrine.
“Yes,” continued Doctor Roux, “we have conquered hydrophobia; nothing is more certain.”
“And you hope to conquer other diseases in the same way?”
The doctor made a fine nervous gesture. “In science one does not hope; one proves. In every thirty thousand experiments one succeeds. We study diseases here. Each physician has his special line of investigation. We hope for nothing. We simply report what we find.”
“But you yourself, Doctor Roux, have certainly hopes that diphtheria is almost conquered?”
The doctor pursed up his mouth.
“The investigations in diphtheria are in just this condition. We have proved at the Pasteur Institute” (Doctor Roux is modest and says ‘we,’ which means himself and his assistant, M. Versin) “that diphtheria is a toxic disease; that is, that it results from a poison. The microbe of diphtheria 335 does not penetrate throughout the system as in the case of most other microbic diseases. It exists only in the mucus found on the pharynx. This microbe does not cause death, but it secretes a poison which penetrates throughout the body and kills. This being proved, of course the next step is to find what will destroy the poison.
“Doctor Behring, working at Berlin, has found that the blood of animals vaccinated for diphtheria gives a therapeutic serum which destroys the diphtheric poison. We are now testing the practical value of the serum at the Institute. This is absolutely our ‘last word’ on diphtheria.”
“And as for cholera! What is the last word?”
“The bacillus virgula of Doctor Koch is believed, by the great majority of savants, to be the true cholera germ. We are trying here, as experimenters are trying elsewhere, to give immunity to animals against the microbe. It is absolutely all that one can say authoritatively on the cholera.”
“And the method of vaccination which Doctor Haffkine believes he has discovered?”
“It has not been proved yet that it will give immunity. Until we have that proof we neither hope nor fear. We simply work and wait. Doctor Haffkine has, you know, severed his connection with the Pasteur Institute and gone to India to continue his researches.”
“But he has had faith enough in his method to try its effects on himself, has he not?”
“Very true, and so have perhaps a hundred others tried its effects. But that proves nothing.”
There is a self-repression about these severe statements which has something of the heroic in it. Who would be so glad to announce absolute safeguards against diphtheria and cholera as this man who has risked his life to find them? Yet, until he is sure, he will not even say “hope.”
I remember the words of Pasteur himself: “To believe that one has found an important scientific fact, to be in a fever to announce it, to compel one’s self for days, weeks, sometimes years, to be silent, to force one’s self to destroy his own experiments and to announce nothing until he has exhausted all contrary hypotheses—that is hard.”
It is hard, but it is one of the strongest elements in the Pasteur spirit of scientific research. Evidently Doctor Roux has learned to practise it vigorously.
“In the same way that we are investigating diphtheria and cholera,” continues the doctor, “we are studying other diseases. But one cannot get a fair idea of what the Pasteur Institute does by any other means than looking at its organizations. There is a great deal done here besides original investigation. In the first place, we are an absolutely independent and free institution. The money was given by popular subscription and without conditions.
“The entire lower floor is devoted to practical work. There are performed the inoculations for hydrophobia on an average of some seventy a day. The practical department is not, however, confined to the treatment of hydrophobia. There are prepared the vaccines for all those diseases of animals which M. Pasteur has proved can be cured by inoculation, such as chicken cholera, splenic fever, and rouget of swine.
A GROUP OF PATIENTS.
“Quantities of virus are sold constantly to farmers for vaccinating their stock. It is these sales which help support the institution. It is an example of science living by science.
“Here on this floor we do our instructing. In the lecture hall across the way M. Ducloux gives his lessons on microbic chemistry, studies the process of fermentation, microbic poisons, all phases, in short, of biological chemistry.
“My work is lectures on, and experiments illustrating, the technique of the microbic method. Those who follow the courses are divided into two classes, students who simply follow the courses and repeat the experiments in the general laboratory, and the savants who conduct original researches here. The latter are furnished each with a private laboratory in the third story. Here for a merely nominal rent they can have the exclusive use of a laboratory furnished with all necessary apparatus, and can pursue whatever class of investigation pleases them.”
“And you have many students?”
“We have always fifteen or twenty, and from all parts of the world. Look at my roll.”
The doctor rose and drew out from the mass of pamphlets and papers on his table a big roll-book.
“I have the names of those who have taken my lectures. Here is an Egyptian, many Russians, a Turk, numbers from South America, from Canada, from the East, from everywhere. Let us look for your compatriots.”
Doctor Roux ran his finger down the pages. “Here is one, Doctor Orchinard of New Orleans. Here another, Doctor Tabadie of New York; and then there is Kenyoun of the 337 United States Marine Service. But there have been more students in the institution from South America than from North.
THE LIBRARY.
“The department of original work is in the third story, and is under Doctor Metchnikoff, who is, you know, a Russian who has established himself here in order to devote himself to scientific investigation. Doctor Metchnikoff is aided by his wife, who acts as preparateur. She is an assistant of great skill and delicacy. He receives no salary for his labor. There are, in fact, three of the leading members of our faculty who receive no salary—M. Pasteur himself, M. Ducloux, and M. Metchnikoff. They have resigned the award they deserve because of our insufficient income.”
“But the common opinion is that you are rich here.”
“I know, but it is a mistake. The Pasteur Institute is very poorly endowed. Its yearly income is only about twenty-four thousand dollars. This revenue comes from three sources: the small appropriations made by the government, the income from the remnant of the private subscription with which it was built, and the product of the sales of vaccine. The fact that we can partly support ourselves,” added the doctor, laughingly, “is the best proof one can have of the practicability of bacteriology.
“The most surprising feature about it is, that in the case of almost every institution copied after us, and there are some eighteen or twenty of them in various parts of the world, the income is much larger than ours. At Berlin and St. Petersburg the incomes are four or five times as large as ours, and, excepting Berlin, we are the only Pasteur Institute doing practical work. It is the old story,” said the doctor resignedly, “one sows and another reaps.”
M. ROUX.
There is certainly injustice and short-sightedness in such a state of things. The investigations of Pasteur have taken too heavy a bundle from the load of horrors which humanity carries, to be allowed to be limited for lack of money:
Immunity from infectious diseases, and nothing else is the logical outcome of the Pasteur doctrines, means too 338 much to make economy on the part of purse-holders excusable, when it is a question of funds for the investigations. When men like Doctor Roux and his associates, men trained in the severe Pasteur spirit and passionate for truth, are ready to sacrifice their lives to this work, overcoming the earth’s plagues, money is the last thing they should be wanting. Especially is this true now, when the work on two of the most terrible scourges of humanity—diphtheria and cholera—stands at critical stages.
There is something harshly ironical, too, in the idea that the institution of Louis Pasteur, whose discoveries have, declares Professor Huxley, made good the war indemnity of five thousand million francs paid by France to Germany, should be crippled for funds.
The doctor’s confidences were cut short by an imperative summons from without. I rose to go.
“Take a stroll through the building,” advised he as he said good-by. I followed his advice.
DOSING THE VIRUS.
From the library one naturally passes to the laboratories. They open from the long halls in numbers. One wonders how so much room can be utilized, but none seems to be going to waste. In each some step of the microbic process is going on. Here is a doctor inoculating a rabbit with the poison of a mad dog sent to the Institute only the day before. The little animal lies on the table insensible, chloroformed, while with the sharp-toothed little trephine the operator makes a tiny hole in its skull, lays bare the brain, and inserts the virus. By the time the aperture is closed Brer Rabbit is sitting up, looking about, none the worse for his experience, 339 save a bald spot on his forehead, a tiny tin tag covered with hieroglyphics hanging from his ear. Two minutes later he was nibbling a carrot; fifteen days later he died “mad as a March hare.”
It is not only rabbits which undergo this operation. Guinea-pigs, chickens, mice and rats are used in quantities. In the laboratory of autopsy there are to be seen aquariums filled with the dainty axolotl of Mexico, glasses of odd fish, even cages of birds.
In another room an experimenter is dissecting a rabbit which has died of rabies, and from whose spinal cord he expects to get material for vaccinal virus.
DR. METCHNIKOFF IN HIS LABORATORY.
In a small dark room, whose temperature is never allowed to vary, which is never swept nor dusted for fear of arousing tranquil microbes, and whose door is never opened except when absolutely necessary, are arranged rows of drying bottles, in which hang bits of the marrow. These bottles are marked with the degree of violence of the rabies from which the animal died, and with the date when the marrow was put up to dry.
Here, attendants are preparing the veal broth and the gelatines in which the infected marrows will be cultivated.
FILLING THE SYRINGES.
Thus as one goes from room to room he can follow the whole method of successive cultures, that method which is “the key-stone of the arch, and without which there could be no vigorous demonstration of the Pasteur method.”
On every hand one sees the interesting “ways of doing things” which characterize the Institute. Here, the cleaning of jars, syringes and tubes is going on; not a simple washing and drying. In the Pasteur household articles are sterilized as well as cleaned—that is, burned in the flames of a spirit lamp, or in an oven. There, a man is blowing bulbs, droll balloon pipettes, all the multitude of glass contrivances the laboratories demand. Here, under a microscope, an investigator has the diphtheria pest, an inoffensive speck; there, another has in his field a whole colony of lively little straight and bent sticks; it is a company of Doctor Koch’s cholera microbes.
Wherever one goes in the building there is a busy intentness, an absorption, an absolute blindness to everything but the work in hand, be it the contents of a culture tube, or the film on a microscope slide. One can easily believe of these workers the story told 340 of M. Pasteur himself, that he had to be hunted up on his wedding morning and pulled away from his microscope, in order to be got into his dress-coat and gloves in time for the ceremony.
Evidently, too, they have not forgotten the words their master spoke on the day of the inauguration of the Institute:
“All the enthusiasm you have had since the beginning, my dear co-laborers, I beg of you to keep; but give it, as an inseparable companion, a severe control. Announce nothing that you cannot prove in a simple, decisive fashion.
“Cultivate the critical spirit. Left to itself it neither awakens ideas nor stimulates to great deeds, but without it all is lost.”
As one goes from room to room, and talks with one and another of the busy, courteous savants, he realizes finally that it is here that Pasteur the scientist is to be found. The labors that made the great savant famous are all summed up here. Here his methods are at work, here is his spirit alive in the men who have best comprehended him, and whom he has been able most deeply to inspire. It is a great thing to achieve. It is a greater thing to inspire others to achieve. Louis Pasteur has done both.
THE RABBITS’ QUARTERS.
STRANGER THAN FICTION.
HUGH BRONTË’S COURTSHIP. THE ELOPEMENT OF HUGH BRONTË AND ALICE MCCLORY.
Unpublished Chapters from “The Brontës in Ireland.”
By Doctor William Wright.
Note.—“The Brontës in Ireland” will be issued in book form by D. Appleton & Co., after the serial publication is concluded in McClure’s Magazine.
I.
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT.
The visit to McClory’s in County Down was another momentous step in the life of Hugh Brontë. 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 Brontë drove up furiously in a Newry gig to the house of McClory in Ballynaskeagh. He was 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 greatness.
But a surprise was in store for him. The cottage door was opened, in response to his somewhat boisterous knock, by a young woman of dazzling beauty. Hugh Brontë, 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 fowl 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. The rector of Magherally, who married her, pronounced her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her hair, which hung in a profusion of ringlets round her shoulders, was luminous gold. Her forehead was Parian marble. Her evenly set teeth were lustrous pearls, and the roses of health glowed on her cheeks. She had the long brown eyelashes that in Ireland so often accompany golden hair, and her deep brown eyes had the violet tint and melting expression which, in a diluted form, descended to her granddaughters, and made the plain and irregular faces of the Brontë girls really attractive. The eyes also contained the lambent fire that Mrs. Gaskell noticed in Charlotte’s eyes, ready to flash indignation and 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, “Alys Brontë,” as she was called by her neighbors in her old age.
Hugh Brontë was completely unmanned by the radiant beauty of the simple country girl who stood before him. He stood awkwardly staring at her with his mouth open, working 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, he was madly and hopelessly in love with his sister.
Like his son, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, in England, and like the Irish curate who proposed marriage to Charlotte on the strength of one night’s acquaintance, 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.
Alice, in 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. Pity melts the heart to love, and Alice was moved greatly by Hugh’s simple narrative.
II.
PURE LOVE AND PARTY STRIFE.
The Christmas holidays passed pleasantly under the hospitable roof of the McClory family. The chief amusement of the neighborhood was drinking in the shebeen, or local public house, but Hugh declined to accompany Paddy to the shebeen, preferring solitude with his sister.
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 proverbial fate. All Miss McClory’s friends were scandalized 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, and on the 12th of July wore orange colors, 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. 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 an 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 unconscious 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 12th of July, the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne, 343 and on the 17th of March, Saint 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, who remained neutral spectators of the conflict till the Catholics fled, and then 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 Brontë 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 shambles. They came to look on Brontë as a Protestant emissary, more influenced by a fiendish desire to plunder the Catholic fold than by love for their beautiful relative.
Hugh Brontë, in his eager simplicity, wanted to supersede all opposition by getting married immediately, but so great a commotion ensued that he had to return to the kilns at Mount Pleasant, leaving his matrimonial prospects in a very unsatisfactory 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 neighbors joined in giving copious advice, and little was talked of in fairs and markets, and at chapel, but the proposed marriage of Alice McClory with 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, literature, 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 party strife.
The priest called on Miss McClory. Everybody 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 of 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 Brontë was nominally a Protestant, but he had not been in a church of any kind from the time he was five 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 central 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 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 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, 344 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 Brontës exceeded in interest that meeting. A dozen wily Ulster Catholics gathered round simple-hearted Hugh Brontë 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. His refusal to drink with McClory’s friends was a 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, the religious question was approached. Brontë 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 philosophers 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 individuals. 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 unlettered. The word in its illiterate use is “contrairyness,” and but for the principle expressed by this word the Brontë 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 shout from the other half-tipsy guests, all of whom had turned fierce and glaring 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,” added he, 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 disheveled, 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 Brontë became a furious Protestant and a frantic lover. There was no lukewarmness or indifference as to his Protestantism. The Brontë 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 was, was prompt, decisive, effectual. It was somewhat 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 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 but 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 crucible of contradiction on that night the jewel love had leaped forth. Each was drawn out from the self-centre in which each had 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.
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 Brontë 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 346 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 Brontë into a family where mental alacrity had full play.
Brontë 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 Brontë 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 Brontë 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 Brontë 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 Brontë’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 Brontë 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 Brontë, 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 Brontë’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 Brontë 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.
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.
IV.
THE ELOPEMENT.
Under restraint, Alice had drooped and pined, but now that Brontë had left the country she was permitted to ride about the neighborhood quite alone. She enjoyed horse exercise greatly, but no matter in what direction she left home her way lay 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 used 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 “Brontë’s post-box,” but the lake has recently been drained, and the trees have, 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 was a very desirable husband for Alice. He was also a Catholic. Brontë 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 incessant perseverance, they prevailed on her to consent to marry Burns, and forget Brontë. 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 throughout. The roses were nailed up around 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 cleaning in excelsis.
The local dressmaker, Annie McCabe, whose granddaughter, of the same name, is now dressmaker in 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 fire from that graced by herself.
At length the wedding-day arrived. Such signs of feasting had never before been seen in Ballynaskeagh. 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 had been boiled, and laid out on great dishes with an abundant coating of melted butter, and a huge roll of roasted 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 Red 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 broth,” first in being the winner. On such occasions crowds of neighbors crowned the hilltops. 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 349 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 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 drowsiness. 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 toward the river Bann, near Banbridge. There was great excitement among the guests, and whiskey and strong language without 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 Brontë 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. Brontë.
The plucky manner in which the lady had 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 befallen 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-humor 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.
The following verses have always been known as the product of Hugh Brontë’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 “the 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 Brontë. 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.” 350