“There was no dawdling when the dance was over. Each of the brothers bowed with an air of gallantry to each of the sisters, and then one of the brothers caught up the spinning-wheel, and, poising it on his shoulder, strode up the homeward side of the glen. All followed smartly and disappeared, in company with the sober figure in black.
“We slipped out of the bower where we had sat entranced, and hurried homeward, with feelings of uncertainty as to the reality of things, in the gathering darkness.”
This is the most complete account I have ever heard of the summer-evening concerts held by the Brontës. Others had often seen these large-limbed, sinewy children of Anak dancing on the green with their flying shadows; but they had failed to appreciate the sylphlike motions of the maidens, or the stately curvetting of the gigantic brothers, and looked on the whole exhibition as something uncanny, and as tending to confirm the popular belief that the Brontës had dealings with the powers of the nether world.
The unique forms and forceful language of the Brontës were lost on their commonplace neighbors, who looked on them as strange and dangerous people. In fact, they were not regarded with much favor by the people of the district, from whom they carefully held aloof; and the belief that they were in league with the devil received a certain amount of confirmation, as we shall see by and by.
When I first began to take an interest in the Brontës I was admonished, in a mysterious manner, to have nothing to do with such people. I was advised to keep out of their way, lest I should hear their odious language, and it was even hinted that they might in some Satanic way do me bodily harm.
I am bound to say that matters in this respect have not altered much since for the better. My attempts, recently, to get accurate information on special points, regarding the Brontës and their ways, have been looked upon as a kind of craze, out of which, I have been assured, I was never likely to reap much credit. And even educated people, when replying to my inquiries on matters of fact, have sometimes felt called on to remind me that I was taking much pains with regard to a dangerous and outlandish family.
In fact, the Brontës paid the penalty for being a little cleverer than the people with whom they came in contact, and with whom they never associated. The Brontës looked down on the people of their own rank in life, and permitted no familiarities of any kind; and the only person who ever joined in their dances, as far as is known, was Farmer Burns. As they held aloof from everybody, they were only known by their strange language and odd ways. Imagination filled up the unknown, and gossips, as usual, made the most of every little circumstance. The fact that Mrs. Brontë had once been a Catholic prejudiced in no small degree the minds of Protestants against the children.
The clergyman’s presence in no way restrained the mirthful exuberance of the dancers. Before he left home he was always one of the party, and on his visits from college and from his living he often joined in their mirth, as formerly. But on the occasion referred to by Mr. McAllister he seemed uninterested in the familiar scene.
He was probably thinking of his precocious little women, Maria and Elizabeth, whom he had left at Cowan Bridge school a month before; or his heart may have been in the Haworth vicarage with the motherless little girls, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, who were under the care of their prim maiden aunt. Even then the children were wise beyond their years, though, in their narrow world, they had scarcely begun to accumulate the experience which enabled them to give local form and color to their father’s stories.