“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.