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.