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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hyacinth, by George A. Birmingham
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Hyacinth
+       1906
+
+Author: George A. Birmingham
+
+Release Date: January 23, 2008 [EBook #10538]
+Last Updated: February 17, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HYACINTH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+HYACINTH
+
+By George A. Birmingham
+
+1906
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+In the year 1850 or thereabouts religious and charitable society in
+England was seized with a desire to convert Irish Roman Catholics to
+the Protestant faith. It is clear to everyone with any experience of
+missionary societies that, the more remote the field of actual work, the
+easier it is to keep alive the interest of subscribers. The mission to
+Roman Catholics, therefore, commenced in that western portion of Galway
+which the modern tourist knows as Connemara, and the enthusiasm was
+immense. Elderly ladies, often with titles, were energetic in the cause
+of the new reformation. Young ladies, some of them very attractive,
+collected money from their brothers and admirers. States-men and Bishops
+headed the subscription-lists, and influential committees earnestly
+debated plans for spending the money which poured in. Faith in the
+efficacy of money handled by influential committees is one of the
+characteristics of the English people, and in this particular case
+it seemed as if their faith were to be justified by results. Most
+encouraging reports were sent to headquarters from Connemara. It
+appeared that converts were flocking in, and that the schools of the
+missionaries were filled to overflowing. In the matter of education
+circumstances favoured the new reformation. The leonine John McHale, the
+Papal Archbishop of Tuam, pursued a policy which drove the children of
+his flock into the mission schools. The only other kind of education
+available was that which some humorous English statesman had called
+‘national,’ and it did not seem to the Archbishop desirable that an
+Irish boy should be beaten for speaking his own language, or rewarded
+for calling himself ‘a happy English child.’ He refused to allow the
+building of national schools in his diocese, and thus left the cleverer
+boys to drift into the mission schools, where they learnt carefully
+selected texts of Scripture along with the multiplication-table. The
+best of them were pushed on through Dublin University, and crowned the
+hopes of their teachers by taking Holy Orders in the Church of England.
+There are still to be met with in Galway and Mayo ancient peasants and
+broken-down inhabitants of workhouses who speak with a certain pride
+of ‘my brother the minister.’ There are also here and there in English
+rectories elderly gentlemen who have almost forgotten the thatched
+cottages where they ate their earliest potatoes.
+
+Among these cleverer boys was one Æneas Conneally, who was something
+more than clever. He was also religious in an intense and enthusiastic
+manner, which puzzled his teachers while it pleased them. His ancestors
+had lived for generations on a seaboard farm, watered by salt rain,
+swept by misty storms. The famine and the fever that followed it left
+him fatherless and brotherless. The emigration schemes robbed him and
+his mother of their surviving relations. The mission school and the
+missionary’s charity effected the half conversion of the mother and a
+whole-hearted acceptance of the new faith on the part of Æneas. Unlike
+most of his fellows in the college classrooms, he refused to regard an
+English curacy as the goal of his ambition. It seemed to him that his
+conversion ought not to end in his parading the streets of Liverpool in
+a black coat and a white tie. He wanted to return to his people and tell
+them in their own tongue the Gospel which he had found so beautiful.
+
+The London committee meditated on his request, and before they arrived
+at a conclusion his mother died, having at the last moment made a
+tardy submission to the Church she had denied. Her apostasy--so the
+missionaries called it--confirmed the resolution of her son, and the
+committee at length agreed to allow him to return to his native village
+as the first Rector of the newly-created parish of Carrowkeel. He was
+provided with all that seemed necessary to insure the success of
+his work. They built him a gray house, low and strong, for it had to
+withstand the gales which swept in from the Atlantic. They bought him
+a field where a cow could graze, and an acre of bog to cut turf from. A
+church was built for him, gray and strong, like his house. It was fitted
+with comfortable pews, a pulpit, a reading-desk, and a movable table of
+wood decently covered with a crimson cloth. Beyond the church stood the
+school he had attended as a boy, whitewashed without and draped inside
+with maps and illuminated texts. A salary, not princely but sufficient,
+was voted to Mr. Conneally, and he was given authority over a
+Scripture-reader and a schoolmaster. The whole group of mission
+buildings--the rectory, the church, and the school--stood, like types
+of the uncompromising spirit of Protestantism, upon the bare hillside,
+swept by every storm, battered by the Atlantic spray. Below them
+Carrowkeel, the village, cowered in such shelter as the sandhills
+afforded. Eastward lonely cottages, faintly smoking dots in the
+landscape, straggled away to the rugged bases of the mountains. The
+Rev. Æneas Conneally entered upon his mission enthusiastically, and
+the London committee awaited results. There were scarcely any results,
+certainly none that could be considered satisfactory. The day for making
+conversions was past, and the tide had set decisively against the new
+reformation. A national school, started by a clearsighted priest, in
+spite of his Archbishop, left the mission school almost without pupils.
+The Scripture-reader lost heart, and took to seeking encouragement
+in the public-house. He found it, and once when exalted--he said,
+spiritually--paraded the streets cursing the Virgin Mary. Worse
+followed, and the committee in London dismissed the man. A diminishing
+income forced on them the necessity of economy, and no successor was
+appointed. For a few years Mr. Conneally laboured on. Then a sharp-eyed
+inspector from London discovered that the schoolmaster took very little
+trouble about teaching, but displayed great talent in prompting his
+children at examinations. He, too, was dismissed, and the committee,
+still bent on economy, appointed a mistress in his place. She was a
+pretty girl, and after she had shivered through the stormy nights of
+two winters in the lonely school-house, Mr. Conneally married her.
+Afterwards the office of school-teacher was also left vacant. The
+whitewashed school fell gradually into decay, and the committee effected
+a further saving.
+
+After his marriage Mr. Conneally’s missionary enthusiasm began to flag.
+His contact with womanhood humanized him. The sternness of the reformer
+died in him, and his neighbours, who never could comprehend his
+religion, came to understand the man. They learned to look upon him as a
+friend, to seek his sympathy and help. In time they learnt to love him.
+
+Two years passed, and a son was born. The village people crowded upon
+him with congratulations, and mothers of wide experience praised the boy
+till Mrs. Conneally’s heart swelled in her with pride. He was christened
+Hyacinth, after a great pioneer and leader of the mission work. The
+naming was Mr. Conneally’s act of contrition for the forsaking of
+his enthusiasm, his recognition of the value of a zeal which had not
+flagged. Failing the attainment of greatness, the next best thing is to
+dedicate a new life to a patron saint who has won the reward of those
+who endure to the end. For two years more life in the glebe house was
+rapturously happy. Such bliss has in it, no doubt, an element of sin,
+and it is not good that it should endure. This was to be seen afterwards
+in calmer times, though hardly at the moment when the break came. There
+was a hope of a second child, a delightful time of expectation; then an
+accident, the blighting of the hope, and in a few days the death of Mrs.
+Conneally. Her husband buried her, digging the first grave in the rocky
+ground that lay around the little church.
+
+For a time Mr. Conneally was stunned by his sorrow. He stopped working
+altogether, ceased to think, even to feel. Men avoided him with
+instinctive reverence at first, and afterwards with fear, as he
+wandered, muttering to himself, among the sandhills and along the beach.
+After a while the power of thought and a sense of the outward things of
+life returned to him. He found that an aged crone from the village had
+established herself in his house, and was caring for Hyacinth. He let
+her stay, and according to her abilities she cooked and washed for him
+and the boy, neither asking wages nor taking orders from him, until she
+died.
+
+Hyacinth grew and throve amazingly. From morning till evening he was in
+the village, among the boats beside the little pier, or in the fields,
+when the men worked there. Everyone petted and loved him, from Father
+Moran, the priest who had started the national school, down to old
+Shamus, the crippled singer of interminable Irish songs and teller of
+heroic legends of the past. It was when he heard the boy repeat a story
+of Finn MacCool to the old crone in the kitchen that Mr. Conneally awoke
+to the idea that he must educate his son. He began, naturally enough,
+with Irish, for it was Irish, and not English, that Hyacinth spoke
+fluently.
+
+Afterwards the English alphabet followed, though not for the sake of
+reading books, for except the Bible and the Prayer-Book Hyacinth was
+taught to read no English books. He learned Latin after a fashion, not
+with nice attention to complexities of syntax, but as a language meant
+to be used, read, and even spoken now and then to Father Moran.
+
+Meanwhile the passage of the years brought changes to Carrowkeel.
+The Admiralty established a coastguard station near the village, and
+arranged, for the greater security of the Empire, that men in blue-serge
+clothes should take it in turns to look at the Atlantic through a
+telescope. Then the unquiet spirit of the Congested Districts Board
+possessed the place for a while. A young engineer designed a new pier to
+shelter fishing-boats. He galvanized the people into unwonted activity,
+and, though sceptical of good results, they earned a weekly wage by
+building it. Boats came, great able boats, which fought the Atlantic,
+and the old curraghs were left to blister in the sun far up on the
+beach. Instructors from the Isle of Man taught new ways of catching
+mackerel. Green patches between the cottages and the sea, once the
+playground of pigs and children, or the marine parade of solemn lines
+of geese, were spread with brown nets. On May mornings, if the take was
+good, long lines of carts rattled down the road carrying the fish to
+the railway at Clifden, and the place bore for a while the appearance
+of vitality. A vagrant Englishman discovered that lobsters could be had
+almost for the asking in Carrowkeel. The commercial instincts of his
+race were aroused in him.
+
+He established a trade between the villagers and the fishmongers of
+Manchester. The price of lobsters rose to the unprecedented figure of
+four shillings a dozen, and it was supposed that even so the promoter of
+the scheme secured a profit.
+
+To Æneas Conneally, growing quietly old, the changes meant very little.
+The coastguards, being bound by one of the articles of the British
+Constitution, came to church on Sunday mornings with exemplary
+regularity, and each man at fixed intervals brought a baby to be
+christened and a woman to be churched. Otherwise they hardly affected
+Mr. Conneally’s life. The great officials who visited Carrowkeel to
+survey the benignant activities of the Congested Districts Board
+were men whose magnificent intellectual powers raised them above any
+recognised form of Christianity. Neither Father Moran’s ministrations
+nor Mr. Conneally’s appealed to them.
+
+The London committee of the mission to Roman Catholics made no inquiry
+about what was going on at Carrowkeel. They asked for no statistics,
+expected no results, but signed quarterly cheques for Mr. Conneally,
+presuming, one may suppose, that if he had ceased to exist they would
+somehow have heard of it.
+
+By far the most important event for Hyacinth and his father was the
+death of their old housekeeper. In the changed state of society in
+Carrowkeel it was found impossible to secure the services of another.
+Hyacinth, at this time about fifteen years old, took to the housework
+without feeling that he was doing anything strange or unmanly. He was
+familiar with the position of ‘bachelor boys’ who, having grown elderly
+under the care of a mother, preferred afterwards the toil of their own
+kitchens to the uncertain issue of marrying a girl to ‘do for them.’
+Life under their altered circumstances was simplified. It seemed
+unnecessary to carry a meal from the room it was cooked in to another
+for the purpose of eating it, so the front rooms of the house, with
+their tattered furniture, were left to moulder quietly in the persistent
+damp. One door was felt to be sufficient for the ingress and egress
+of two people from a house. The kitchen door, being at the back of the
+house, was oftenest the sheltered one, so the front door was bolted, and
+the grass grew up to it. One by one, as Hyacinth’s education required,
+the Latin and Greek books were removed from the forsaken study, and
+took their places among the diminishing array of plates and cups on the
+kitchen dresser. The spreading and removal of a tablecloth for every
+meal came to be regarded as foolish toil. When room was required on the
+table for plates, the books and papers were swept on one side. A pile of
+potatoes, and the pan, with bacon or a fish perhaps still frizzling in
+it, was set in the place left vacant.
+
+Morning and evening Æneas Conneally expected his son to join with him in
+prayer. The two knelt together on the earthen floor facing the window,
+while the old man meditated aloud on Divine things. There were breaks in
+his speech and long silences, so that sometimes it was hard to tell
+when his prayer had really ended. These devotions formed a part of
+his father’s life into which Hyacinth never really entered at all. He
+neither rebelled nor mocked. He simply remained outside. So when his
+father wandered off to solitary places on the seashore, and sat gazing
+into the sunset or a gathering storm, Hyacinth neither followed nor
+questioned him. Sometimes on winter nights when the wind howled more
+fiercely than usual round the house, the old man would close the book
+they read together, and repeat aloud long passages from the Apocalypse.
+His voice, weak and wavering at first, would gather strength as he
+proceeded, and the young man listened, stirred to vague emotion over the
+fall of Babylon the Great.
+
+For the most part Hyacinth’s time was his own. Even the hours of study
+were uncertain. He read when he liked, and his father seemed content
+with long days of idleness followed by others of application. It was,
+indeed, only owing to his love of what he read that the boy learned at
+all. Often while he tramped from his home to the village at midday his
+heart was hot within him with some great thought which had sprung to him
+from a hastily construed chorus of Euripides. Sometimes he startled the
+fishermen when he went with them at night by chanting Homer’s rolling
+hexameters through the darkness while the boat lay waiting, borne
+gunwale down to the black water with the drag of the net that had been
+shot.
+
+There was a tacit understanding that Hyacinth, like his father, was
+to take Holy Orders. He matriculated in Trinity College when he was
+eighteen, and, as is often done by poorer students, remained at home,
+merely passing the required examinations, until he took his degree,
+and the time came for his entering the divinity school. Then it became
+necessary for him to reside in Dublin, and the first great change in his
+life took place.
+
+The night before he left home he and his father sat together in the
+kitchen after they had finished their evening meal. For a long time
+neither of them spoke. Hyacinth held a book in his hand, but scarcely
+attempted to read it. His thoughts wandered from hopeful expectation of
+what the future was to bring him and the new life was to mean, to vague
+regrets, weighted with misgivings, which would take no certain shape.
+There crowded upon him recollections of busy autumn days when the grain
+harvest overtook the belated hay-making, and men toiled till late in
+the fields; of long nights in the springtime when he tugged at the
+fishing-nets, and felt the mackerel slipping and flapping past his
+feet in the darkness; of the longer winter nights when he joined the
+gatherings of the boys and girls to dance jigs and reels on the earthen
+floor of some kitchen. It seemed now that all this was past and over for
+him. Holiday time would bring him back to Carrowkeel, but would it be
+the same? Would he be the same?
+
+He looked at his father, half hoping for sympathy; but the old man sat
+gazing--it seemed to Hyacinth stupidly--into the fire. He wondered if
+his father had forgotten that this was their last evening together. Then
+suddenly, without raising his eyes, the old man began to speak, and it
+appeared that he, too, was thinking of the change.
+
+‘I do not know, my son, what they will teach you in their school of
+divinity. I have long ago forgotten all I learned there, and I have not
+missed the knowledge. It does not seem to me now that what they taught
+me has been of any help in getting to know Him.’
+
+He paused for a long time. Hyacinth was familiar enough with his
+father’s ways of speech to know that the emphatic ‘Him’ meant the God
+whom he worshipped.
+
+‘There is, I am sure, only one way in which we can become His friends.
+_These are they which have come out of great tribulation!_ You remember
+that, Hyacinth? That is the only way. You may be taught truths about
+Him, but they matter very little. You have already great thoughts,
+burning thoughts, but they will not of themselves bring you to Him. The
+other way is the only way. Shall I wish it for you, my son? Shall I give
+it to you for my blessing? May great tribulation come upon you in your
+life! _Great tribulation!_ See how weak my faith is even now at the very
+end. I cannot give you this blessing, although I know very well that it
+is the only way. I know this, because I have been along this way myself,
+and it has led me to Him.’
+
+Again he paused. It did not seem to Hyacinth to be possible to say
+anything. He was not sure in his heart that the friendship of the Man of
+Sorrows was so well worth having that he would be content to pay for it
+by accepting such a benediction from his father.
+
+‘I shall do this for you, Hyacinth: I shall pray that when the choice is
+given you, the great choice between what is easy and what is hard, the
+right decision may be made for you. I do not know in what form it will
+come. Perhaps it will be as it was with me. He made the choice for me,
+for indeed I could not have chosen for myself. He set my feet upon the
+narrow way, forced me along it for a while, and now at the end I see His
+face.’
+
+Hyacinth had heard enough of the brief bliss of his father’s married
+life to understand. He caught for the first time a glimpse of the
+meaning of the solitary life, the long prayers, and the meditations. He
+was profoundly moved, but it did not even then seem to him desirable to
+choose such a way, or to have such attainment thrust on him.
+
+Next morning the autumn sunlight chased the recollection of his emotion
+from his mind. The fishermen stopped his car as he drove through the
+street to shake hands with him. Their wives shouted familiar blessings
+from the cabin doors. Father Moran came bare-headed to the gate of his
+presbytery garden and waved a farewell.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+There is that about the material fabric, the actual stone and mortar, of
+Trinity College, Dublin, which makes a vivid appeal to the imagination
+of the common man. The cultured sentimentalist will not indeed be
+able to lave his soul in tepid emotion while he walks through these
+quadrangles, as he may among the cloisters and chapels of the Oxford
+colleges. The amateur of the past cannot here stand at gaze before any
+single building as he does before the weather-beaten front of Oriel,
+tracing in imagination the footsteps of Newman or Arnold. Yet to the
+average man, and far more to the newly emancipated schoolboy, Trinity
+College, Dublin, makes an appeal which can hardly be ignored. In Oxford
+and Cambridge town and University are mixed together; shops jostle and
+elbow colleges in the streets. In Dublin a man leaves the city behind
+him when he enters the college, passes completely out of the atmosphere
+of the University when he steps on to the pavement. The physical
+contrast is striking enough, appealing to the ear and the eye. The
+rattle of the traffic, the jangling of cart bells, the inarticulate
+babel of voices, suddenly cease when the archway of the great
+entrance-gate is passed.
+
+An immense silence takes their place. There is no longer any need for
+watchfulness, nor risk of being hustled by the hurrying crowds.
+Instead of footway and street crossing there are broad walks, untrodden
+stretches of smooth grass. The heavy campanile is in front, and heights
+of gray building frown down on each side. It needs no education, not
+even any imagination, to appreciate the change. It is not necessary to
+know that great scholars inhabited the place, to recall any name or
+any man’s career. The appeal is not to a recollected impression of the
+Middle Ages, or indeed of any past, remote or near. It is the spirit of
+scholarship itself, abstract, intangible, which creates this atmosphere.
+Knowledge, a severe goddess, awes while she beckons.
+
+Hyacinth Conneally had submitted himself to such emotions time after
+time when, fresh from the wilds of Connemara, he made his way to the
+examination-hall, an outside student in a borrowed cap and gown. Now,
+when for the first time he entered into the actual life of the college,
+could look up at windows of rooms that were his own, and reckon on his
+privilege of fingering tomes from the shelves of the huge library, the
+spirit of the place awed him anew. He neither analyzed nor attempted
+an expression of what he felt, but his first night within the walls was
+restless because of the inspiration which filled him.
+
+Yet this college does not fail to make an appeal also to the thinking
+mind, only it is a strange appeal, tending to sadness. The sudden
+silence after the tumult of the streets has come for some minds to
+be the symbol of a divorce between the knowledge within and the life
+without. And this is not the separation which must always exist between
+thought and action, the gulf fixed between the student and the merchant.
+It is a real divorce between the nation and the University, between
+the two kinds of life which ought, like man and woman, to complete each
+other through their very diversity, but here have gone hopelessly apart.
+Never once through all the centuries of Ireland’s struggle to express
+herself has the University felt the throb of her life. It is true
+that Ireland’s greatest patriots, from Swift to Davis, have been her
+children; but she has never understood their spirit, never looked on
+them as anything but strangers to her family. They have been to her
+stray robber wasps, to be driven from the hive; while to the others they
+have seemed cygnets among her duckling brood. It is very wonderful that
+the University alone has been able to resist the glamour of Ireland’s
+past, and has failed to admire the persistency of her nationality.
+There has surely been enough in every century that has passed since the
+college was founded to win it over from alien thought and the ideals of
+the foreigner.
+
+All this Hyacinth came to feel afterwards, and learnt in bitterness of
+spirit to be angry at the University’s isolation from Irish life. At
+first quite other thoughts crowded upon his mind. He felt a rebellion
+against his father’s estimate of what he was to learn. It seemed to him
+that he had come into vital touch with the greatest life of all. He was
+to join the ranks of those who besieged the ears of God for knowledge,
+and left behind them to successors yet unborn great traditions of the
+enigmas they had guessed. In entering upon the study of theology he
+seemed to become a soldier in the sacred band, the élite of the army
+which won and guarded truth. Already he was convinced that there could
+be no greater science than the Divine one, no more inspiring moment in
+life than this one when he took his first step towards the knowledge of
+God.
+
+He crossed the quadrangle with his mind full of such thoughts,
+and joined a group of students round the door of one of the
+examination-halls. It did not shock his sense of fitness that some of
+his fellow-students in the great science wore shabby clothes, or that
+others scorned the use of a razor. Bred as he had been at home, he felt
+no incongruity between dirty collars and the study of divinity. It
+was not until he caught scraps of conversation that he experienced an
+awakening from his dream. One eager group surrounded a foreseeing youth
+who had written the dates of the first four General Councils of the
+Church upon his shirt-cuff.
+
+‘Read them out, like a good man,’ said one.
+
+‘Hold on a minute,’ said another, ‘till I see if I have got them right.
+I ground them up specially this morning. Nicæa, 318--no, hang it! that’s
+the number of Bishops who were present; 325 was the date, wasn’t it?’
+
+‘What was the row about at Chalcedon?’ asked a tall, pale youth. ‘Didn’t
+some monk or other go for Cyril of Alexandria?’
+
+‘You’ll be stuck anyhow, Tommy,’ said a neat, dapper little man with a
+very ragged gown.
+
+Hyacinth slipped past the group, and approached two better dressed
+students who stood apart from the others.
+
+‘Is this,’ he asked, ‘where the entrance examination to the divinity
+school is to be held?’
+
+For answer he received a curt ‘Yes’ and a stare. Apparently his suit of
+brown Connemara homespun did not commend him to these aristocrats. They
+turned their backs on him, and resumed their conversation.
+
+‘She was walking up and down the pier listening to the band with two
+of the rankest outsiders you ever set eyes on--medicals out of Paddy
+Dunn’s. Of course I could do nothing else but break it off.’
+
+‘Oh, you were engaged to her, then? I didn’t know.’
+
+‘Well, I was and I wasn’t. Anyhow, I thought it better to have a clear
+understanding. She came up to me outside the door of Patrick’s on Sunday
+afternoon just as if nothing had happened. “Hullo, Bob,” says she;
+“I haven’t seen you for ages.” “My name,” said I, “is Mr. Banks”--just
+like that, as cool as you please. I could see she felt it. “I’ve called
+you Bob,” says she, very red in the face, “and you’ve called me Maimie
+ever since we went to Sunday-school together, and I’m not going to begin
+calling you Mr. Banks now, my boy-o! so don’t you think it!”’
+
+It was a relief to Hyacinth when he was tapped on the arm by a boy with
+a very pimply face, who thrust a paper into his hand, and distracted
+his attention from the final discomfiture of Maimie, which Mr. Banks was
+recounting in a clear, high-pitched voice, as if he wished everyone in
+the neighbourhood to hear it.
+
+‘I hope you’ll come,’ said the boy.
+
+‘Where?’
+
+‘It’s all in the paper. The students’ prayer-meeting, held every
+Wednesday morning at nine o’clock sharp. Special meeting to-morrow.’
+
+Hyacinth was bewildered. There was something quite unfamiliar in this
+prompt and business-like advertisement of prayer. The student with the
+papers began to be doubtful of him.
+
+‘You’re not High Church, are you?’ he asked. ‘We’re not. We don’t have
+printed offices, with verses and responds, and that sort of thing. We
+have extempore prayer by members of the union.’
+
+‘No; I’m not High Church,’ said Hyacinth--‘at least, I think not. I
+don’t really know much about these things. I’ll be very glad to go to
+your meeting.’
+
+‘That’s right,’ said the other. ‘All are welcome. There will be special
+prayer to-morrow for the success of the British arms. I suppose you
+heard that old Kruger has sent an ultimatum. There will be war at once.’
+
+There was a sudden movement among the students; gowns were pulled
+straight and caps adjusted.
+
+‘Here he comes,’ said someone.
+
+Dr. Henry, the divinity professor, crossed the square rapidly. He was a
+middle-aged man, stout, almost ponderous, in figure; but he held himself
+rigidly upright, and walked fast across the square. The extreme neatness
+of his clothes contrasted with the prevailing shabbiness of the students
+and the assistant lecturers who followed him. Yet he did not seem to be
+a man who gave to externals more than their due share of consideration.
+His broad forehead gave promise of great intellectual power, a promise
+half belied by the narrow gray eyes beneath it. These were eyes which
+might see keenly, and would certainly see things just as they are,
+though they were not likely to catch any glimpse of that greater
+world where objects cannot be focussed sharply. Yet in them, an odd
+contradiction, there lurked a possibility of humorous twinkling. The
+man was capable perhaps of the broad tolerance of the great humorist,
+certainly of very acute perception of life’s minor incongruities. His
+thin lips were habitually pressed together, giving a suggestion of
+strength to the set of his mouth. A man with such a mouth can think and
+act, but not feel either passionately or enduringly. He will direct men
+because he knows his own mind, but is not likely to sway them because
+he will always be master of himself, and will not become enslaved to
+any great enthusiasm. The students trooped into the hall, and the
+examination began. The assistant lecturers helped in the work. Each
+student was called up in turn, asked a few questions, and given a
+portion of the Greek Testament to translate. For the most part their
+capacities were known beforehand. There were some who had won honours
+in their University course before entering the divinity school. For
+them the examiners were all smiles, and the business of the day was
+understood to be perfunctory. Others were recognised as mere pass men,
+whom it was necessary to spur to some exertion. A few, like Hyacinth,
+were unknown. These were the poorer students who had not been able to
+afford to reside at the University sooner than was absolutely necessary.
+Their knowledge, generally scanty, was received by the examiners with
+undisguised contempt. It fell to Hyacinth’s lot to present himself to
+Dr. Henry. He did so tremulously.
+
+The professor inquired his name, and looked him over coldly.
+
+‘Read for me,’ he said, handing him a Greek Testament. The passage
+marked was St. Paul’s great description of charity. It was very familiar
+to Hyacinth, and he read it with a serious feeling for the words. Dr.
+Henry, who at first had occupied himself with some figures on a sheet of
+paper, looked up and listened attentively.
+
+‘Where were you at school,’ he asked. ‘Who taught you Greek?’
+
+‘My father taught me, sir.’
+
+‘Ah! You have got a very peculiar pronunciation, and you’ve made an
+extraordinary number of mistakes in accentuation and quantity, but
+you’ve read as if St. Paul meant something. Now translate.’
+
+‘You have given me,’ he said, when Hyacinth had finished, ‘the
+Authorized Version word for word. Can you do no better than that?’
+
+‘I can do it differently,’ said Hyacinth, ‘not better.’
+
+‘Do you know any Greek outside of the New Testament?’
+
+Hyacinth repeated a few lines from Homer.
+
+‘That book of the “Odyssey” is not in the college course,’ said Dr.
+Henry. ‘How did you come to read it?’
+
+Hyacinth had no explanation to give. He had read the book, it seemed,
+without being forced, and without hope of getting a prize. He recited it
+as if he liked it. The remainder of the examination disclosed the fact
+that he was lamentably deficient in the rudiments of Greek grammar, and
+had the very vaguest ideas of the history of the Church.
+
+Afterwards Professor Henry discussed the new class with his assistants
+as they crossed the square together.
+
+‘The usual lot,’ said Dr. Spenser--‘half a dozen scholars, perhaps one
+man among them with real brains. The rest are either idlers or, what is
+worse, duffers.’
+
+‘I hit on one man with brains,’ said Dr. Henry.
+
+‘Oh! Thompson, I suppose. I saw that you took him. He did well in his
+degree exam.’
+
+‘No,’ said Dr. Henry; ‘the man I mean has more brains than Thompson.
+He’s a man I never heard of before. His name is Conneally. He looks
+as if he came up from the wilds somewhere. He has hands like an
+agricultural labourer, and a brogue that I fancy comes from Galway.
+But he’s a man to keep an eye on. He may do something by-and-by if he
+doesn’t go off the lines. We must try and lick him into shape a bit.’
+
+Hyacinth Conneally knew extremely little about the politics, foreign or
+domestic, of the English nation. His father neither read newspapers nor
+cared to discuss such rumours of the doings of Governments as happened
+to reach Carrowkeel. On the other hand, he knew a good deal about
+the history of Ireland, and the English were still for him the ‘new
+foreigners’ whom Keating describes. His intercourse with the fishermen
+and peasants of the Galway seaboard had intensified his vague dislike
+of the series of oscillations between bullying and bribery which make up
+the story of England’s latest attempts to govern Ireland. Without in the
+least understanding the reasons for the war in South Africa, he felt
+a strong sympathy with the Boers. To him they seemed a small people
+doomed, if they failed to defend themselves, to something like the
+treatment which Ireland had received.
+
+It was therefore with surprise, almost with horror, that he listened for
+the first time to the superlative Imperialism of the Protestant Unionist
+party when he attended the prayer-meeting to which he had been invited.
+The room was well filled with students, who joined heartily in the
+singing of ‘Onward, Christian soldiers,’ a hymn selected as appropriate
+for the occasion. An address by the chairman, a Dublin clergyman,
+followed. According to this gentleman the Boers were a psalm-singing
+but hypocritical nation addicted to slave-driving. England, on the
+other hand, was the pioneer of civilization, and the nursing-mother of
+missionary enterprise. It was therefore clear that all good Christians
+ought to pray for the success of the British arms. The speech bewildered
+rather than irritated Hyacinth. The mind gasps for a time when immersed
+suddenly in an entirely new view of things, and requires time to adjust
+itself for pleasure or revolt, just as the body does when plunged into
+cold water. It had never previously occurred to him that an Irishman
+could regard England as anything but a pirate. Anger rapidly succeeded
+his surprise while he listened to the prayers which followed. It was
+apparently open to any student present to give utterance, as occasion
+offered, to his desires, and a large number of young men availed
+themselves of the opportunity. Some spoke briefly and haltingly, some
+laboriously attempted to adapt the phraseology of the Prayer-Book to the
+sentiment of the moment, a few had the gift of rapid and even eloquent
+supplication. These last were the hardest to endure. They prefaced their
+requests with fantastic eulogies of England’s righteousness, designed
+apparently for the edification of the audience present in the flesh, for
+they invariably began by assuring the Almighty that He was well aware
+of the facts, and generally apologized to Him for recapitulating
+them. Hyacinth’s anger increased as he heard the fervent groans which
+expressed the unanimous conviction of the justice of the petitions. No
+one seemed to think it possible that the right could be on the other
+side.
+
+When the meeting was over, the secretary, whose name, it appeared, was
+Mackenzie, greeted Hyacinth warmly.
+
+‘Glad to have you with us,’ he said. ‘I hope you’ll always come. I shall
+be delighted to propose you as a member of the union. Subscription
+one shilling, to defray necessary expenses. In any case, whether you
+subscribe or not, we shall be glad to have you with us.’
+
+‘I shall never come again,’ said Hyacinth.
+
+Mackenzie drew back, astonished.
+
+‘Why not? Didn’t you like the meeting? I thought it was capital--so
+informal and hearty. Didn’t you think it was hearty? But perhaps you are
+High Church. Are you?’
+
+Hyacinth remembered that this identical question had been put to him the
+day before by the pimply-faced boy who distributed leaflets. He wondered
+vaguely at the importance which attached to the nickname.
+
+‘I am not sure,’ he said, ‘that I quite know what you mean. You see, I
+have only just entered the divinity school, and I hardly know anything
+about theology. What is a High Churchman?’
+
+‘Oh, it doesn’t require any theology to know that. It’s the simplest
+thing in the world. A High Churchman is--well, of course, a High
+Churchman sings Gregorian chants, you know, and puts flowers on
+the altar. There’s more than that, of course. In fact, a High
+Churchman------’ He paused and then added with an air of victorious
+conviction: ‘But anyhow if you were High Church you would be sure to
+know it.’
+
+‘Ah, well,’ said Hyacinth, turning to leave the room, ‘I don’t know
+anything about it, so I suppose I’m not High Church.’
+
+Mackenzie, however, was not going to allow him to escape so easily.
+
+‘Hold on a minute. If you’re not High Church why won’t you come to our
+meetings?’
+
+‘Because I can’t join in your prayers when I am not at all sure that
+England ought to win.’
+
+‘Good Lord!’ said Mackenzie. It is possible to startle even the
+secretary of a prayer union into mild profanity. ‘You don’t mean to tell
+me you are a Pro-Boer, and you a divinity student?’
+
+It had not hitherto struck Hyacinth that it was impossible to combine a
+sufficient orthodoxy with a doubt about the invariable righteousness of
+England’s quarrels. Afterwards he came to understand the matter better.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Mackenzie was not at heart an ill-natured man, and he would have
+repudiated with indignation the charge of being a mischief-maker. He
+felt after his conversation with Hyacinth much as most men would if they
+discovered an unsuspected case of small-pox among their acquaintances.
+His first duty was to warn the society in which he moved of the
+existence of a dangerous man, a violent and wicked rebel. He repeated
+a slightly exaggerated version of what Hyacinth had said to everyone
+he met. The pleasurable sense of personal importance which comes with
+having a story to tell grew upon him, and he spent the greater part
+of the day in seeking out fresh confidants to swell the chorus of his
+commination.
+
+In England at the time public opinion was roused to a fever heat of
+patriotic enthusiasm, and the Irish Protestant Unionists were eager to
+outdo even the music-halls in Imperialist sentiment, the students of
+Trinity College being then, as ever, the ‘death or glory’ boys of
+Irish loyalty. It is easy to imagine how Hyacinth’s name was whispered
+shudderingly in the reading-room of the library, how his sentiments were
+anathematized in the dining-hall at commons, how plots were hatched for
+the chastisement of his iniquity over the fire in the evenings, when
+pipes were lit and tea was brewed.
+
+At the end of the week Hyacinth was in an exceedingly uncomfortable
+position. Outside the lecture-rooms nobody would speak to him. Inside he
+found himself the solitary occupant of the bench he sat on--a position
+of comparative physical comfort, for the other seats were crowded, but
+not otherwise desirable. A great English poet had just composed a poem,
+which a musician, no doubt equally eminent, had set to a noble tune.
+It embodied an appeal for funds for purposes not clearly specified, and
+hazarded the experiment of rhyming ‘cook’s son’ with ‘Duke’s son,’ which
+in less fervent times might have provoked the criticism of the captious.
+It became the fashion in college to chant this martial ode whenever
+Hyacinth was seen approaching. It was thundered out by a choir who
+marched in step up and down his staircase. Bars of it were softly
+hummed in his ear while he tried to note the important truths which
+the lecturers impressed upon their classes. One night five musicians
+relieved each other at the task of playing the tune on a concertina
+outside his door. They commenced briskly at eight o’clock in the
+evening, and the final sleepy version only died away at six the next
+morning.
+
+Dr. Henry, who either did not know or chose to ignore the state of
+the students’ feelings, advised Hyacinth to become a member of the
+Theological Debating Society. The election to membership, he said, was
+a mere form, and nobody was ever excluded. Hyacinth sent his name to
+the secretary, and was blackbeaned by an overwhelming majority of the
+members. Shortly afterwards the Lord-lieutenant paid a visit to the
+college, and the students seized the chance of displaying their loyalty
+to the Throne and Constitution. They assembled outside the library,
+which the representative of Queen Victoria was inspecting under the
+guidance of the Provost and two of the senior Fellows. It is the nature
+of the students of Trinity College to shout while they wait for the
+development of interesting events, and on this occasion even the library
+walls were insufficient to exclude the noise. The excellent nobleman
+inside found himself obliged to cast round for original remarks about
+the manuscript of the ‘Book of Kells,’ while the air was heavy with the
+verses which commemorate the departure of ‘fifty thousand fighting men’
+to Table Bay. When at length he emerged on the library steps the tune
+changed, as was right and proper, to ‘God save the Queen.’ Strangely
+enough, Hyacinth had never before heard the national anthem. It is not
+played or sung often by the natives of Connemara, and although the ocean
+certainly forms part of the British Empire, the Atlantic waves have
+not yet learned to beat out this particular melody. So it happened
+that Hyacinth, without meaning to be offensive, omitted the ceremony of
+removing his hat. A neighbour, joyful at the opportunity, snatched the
+offending garment, and skimmed it far over the heads of the crowd. A few
+hard kicks awakened Hyacinth more effectually to a sense of his crime,
+and it was with a torn coat and many bruises that he escaped in the end
+to the shelter of his rooms, less inclined to be loyal than when he left
+them.
+
+After a few weeks it became clear that the British armies in South
+Africa were not going to reap that rich and unvarying crop of victories
+which the valour of the soldiers and the ability of the generals
+deserved. The indomitable spirit of the great nation rose to the
+occasion, and the position of those who entertained doubts about the
+justice of the original quarrel became more than ever unbearable.
+Hyacinth took to wandering by himself through parts of the city in which
+he was unlikely to meet any of his fellow-students. His soul grew bitter
+within him. The course of petty persecution to which he was subjected
+hardened his original sentimental sympathy with the Boer cause into a
+clearly defined hatred of everything English. When he got clear of the
+college and the hateful sound of the ‘cook’s son, Duke’s son’ tune, he
+tramped along, gloating quietly over the news of the latest ‘regrettable
+incident.’
+
+He was very lonely and friendless, for not even the discomfiture of his
+enemies can make up to a young man for the want of a friend to speak to.
+An inexpressible longing for home came over him. There was a shop in a
+by-street which exposed photographs of Galway scenery in its windows for
+a time. Hyacinth used to go day by day to gaze at them. The modest front
+of the Gaelic League Hyce was another haunt of his. He used to stand
+Debating his eyes on the Irish titles of the books in the window, and
+repeating the words he read aloud to himself until the passers-by turned
+to look at him. Once he entered a low-browed, dingy shop merely because
+the owner’s name was posted over the door in Gaelic characters. It was
+one of those shops to be found in the back streets of most large towns
+which devote themselves to a composite business, displaying newspapers,
+apples, tobacco, and sweets for sale. The afternoon light, already
+growing feeble in the open air, had almost deserted the interior of
+the shop. At first Hyacinth saw nothing but an untidy red-haired
+girl reading in a corner by the light of a candle. He asked her for
+cigarettes. She rose, and laid her book and the candle on the counter.
+It was one of O’Growney’s Irish primers, dirty and pencilled. Hyacinth’s
+heart warmed to her at once. Was she not trying to learn the dear Irish
+which the barefooted girls far away at home shouted to each other as
+they dragged the seaweed up from the shore? Then from the far end of the
+shop he heard a man’s voice speaking Irish. It was not the soft liquid
+tongue of the Connaught peasants, but a language more regular and
+formal. The man spoke it as if it were a language he had learned,
+comparatively slowly and with effort. Yet the sound of it seemed to
+Hyacinth one of the sweetest things he had ever heard. Not even the
+shrinking self-distrust which he had been taught by repeated snubbings
+and protracted ostracism could prevent him from making himself known to
+this stranger.
+
+‘The blessing of God upon Ireland!’ he said.
+
+There was not a moment’s hesitation on the part of the stranger. The
+sound of the Gaelic was enough for him. He stretched out both hands to
+Hyacinth.
+
+‘Is it that you also are one of us--one of the Gaels?’ he asked.
+Hyacinth seized the outstretched hands and held them tight. The feeling
+of offered friendship and companionship warmed him with a sudden glow.
+He felt that his eyes were filling with tears, and that his voice would
+break if he tried to speak, but he did not care at all. He poured out a
+long Gaelic greeting, scarcely knowing what he said. Perhaps neither
+the man whose hands he held nor the owner of the shop behind the counter
+fully understood him, but they guessed at his feelings.
+
+‘Is it that you are a stranger here and lonely? Where is your home? What
+name is there on you?’
+
+‘Maiseadh, I am a stranger indeed and lonely too,’ said Hyacinth.
+
+‘You are a stranger no longer, then. We are all of us friends with each
+other. You speak our own dear tongue, and that is enough to make us
+friends.’
+
+The tobacconist, it appeared, also spoke Irish of a kind. He cast
+occasional remarks into the conversation which followed, less, it seemed
+to Hyacinth, with a view of giving expression to any thought than for
+the sake of airing some phrases which he had somewhat inadequately
+learned. Indeed, it struck Hyacinth very soon that his new friend was
+getting rather out of his depth in his ‘own dear tongue.’ At last the
+tobacconist said with a smile:
+
+‘I’m afraid we must ask Mr. Conneally--didn’t you say that Conneally was
+your name?--to speak the Beurla. I’m clean beaten with the Gaelic, and
+you can’t go much further yourself, Cahal. Isn’t that the truth, now.’
+
+‘And small blame to me,’ said Cahal--in English, Charles--Maguire.
+‘After all, what am I but a learner? And it’s clear that Mr. Conneally
+has spoken it since ever he spoke at all.’
+
+Hyacinth smiled and nodded. Maguire went on:
+
+‘What are you doing this afternoon? What do you say to coming round with
+me to see Mary O’Dwyer? It’s her “at home” day, and I’m just on my way
+there.’
+
+‘But,’ said Hyacinth, ‘I don’t know her. I can hardly go to her house,
+can I?’
+
+‘Oh, I’ll introduce you,’ said Maguire cheerfully. ‘She allows me to
+bring anyone I like to see her. She likes to know anyone who loves
+Ireland and speaks Gaelic. Perhaps we’ll meet Finola too; she’s often
+there.’
+
+‘Meet who?’
+
+‘Finola. That’s what we call Miss Goold--Augusta Goold, you know. We
+call her Finola because she shelters the rest of us under her wings when
+the Moyle gets tempestuous. You remember the story?’
+
+‘Of course I do,’ said Hyacinth, who had learnt the tale of Lir’s
+daughter as other children do Jack the Giant-Killer. ‘And who is Miss
+O’Dwyer?’
+
+‘Oh, she writes verses. Surely you know them?’
+
+Hyacinth shook his head.
+
+‘What a pity! We all admire them immensely. She has something nearly
+every week in the _Croppy_. She has just brought out a volume of lyrics.
+Her brother worked the publishing of it in New York. He is mixed up with
+literary people there. You must have heard of him at all events. He’s
+Patrick O’Dwyer, one of the few who stood by O’Neill when he fought the
+priests. He gave up the Parliamentary people after that. No honest man
+could do anything else.’
+
+He conducted Hyacinth to one of the old squares on the north side of the
+city. When the tide of fashion set southwards, spreading terraces and
+villas from Leeson Street to Killiney, it left behind some of the finest
+houses in Dublin. Nowadays for a comparatively low rent it is possible
+to live in a splendid house if you do not aspire to the glory of a smart
+address. Miss O’Dwyer’s house, for instance, boasted a spacious hall and
+lofty sitting-rooms, with impressive ceilings and handsome fireplaces;
+yet she paid for it little more than half the rent which a cramped villa
+in Clyde Road would have cost her. Even so, it was somewhat of a mystery
+to her friends how Miss O’Dwyer managed to live there. A solicitor who
+had his offices on the ground-floor probably paid the rent of the whole
+house; but the profits of verse-making are small, and a poetess, like
+meaner women, requires food, clothes, and fire. Indeed, Miss O’Dwyer,
+no longer ‘M. O’D.,’ whose verses adorned the _Croppy_, but ‘Miranda,’
+served an English paper as Irish correspondent. It was a pity that a
+pen certainly capable of better things should have been employed
+in describing the newest costume of the Lord Lieutenant’s wife at
+Punchestown, or the confection of pale-blue tulle which, draped round
+Mrs. Chesney, adorned a Castle ball. Miss O’Dwyer herself was heartily
+ashamed of the work, but it was, or appeared to her to be, necessary to
+live, and even with the aid of occasional remittances from Patrick in
+New York, she could scarcely have afforded her friends a cup of tea
+without the guineas earned by torturing the English language in a
+weekly chronicle of Irish society’s clothes. Even with the help of such
+earnings, poverty was for ever tapping her on the shoulder, and no one
+except Mary herself and her one maid-servant knew how carefully fire
+and light had to be economized in the splendid rooms where an extinct
+aristocracy had held revels a century before.
+
+Hyacinth and his friend advanced past the solicitor’s doors, and up
+the broad staircase as far as the drawing-room. For a time they got no
+further than the threshold. The opening of the door was greeted with a
+long-drawn and emphatic ‘Hush!’ from the company within. Maguire laid
+his hand on Hyacinth’s arm, and the two stood still looking into the
+room. What was left of the feeble autumn twilight was almost excluded by
+half-drawn curtains. No lamp was lit, and the fire cast only fitful rays
+here and there through the room. It was with difficulty that Hyacinth
+discerned figures in a semicircle, and a slim woman in a white dress
+standing apart from the others near the fire. Then he heard a voice,
+a singularly sweet voice, as it seemed to him, reciting with steady
+emphasis on the syllables which marked the rhythm of the poem:
+
+     ‘Out there in the West, where the heavy gray clouds are
+     insistent,
+     Where the sky stoops to gather the earth into mournful
+     embraces,
+     Where the country lies saturate, sodden, round saturate
+     hamlets--
+
+     ‘Out there in the sunset where rages and surges Atlantic,
+     And the salt is commingled with rain over desolate beaches,
+     Thy heart, O beloved, is still beating--fitfully, feebly.
+
+     ‘Is beating--ah! not as it beat in the squadrons of Sarafield,
+     Exultantly, joyously, gladly, expectant of battle,
+     With throbs like the notes of the drums when men gather for
+     fighting.
+
+     ‘Beats still; but, ah! not as it beat in the latest Fitzgerald,
+     Nobly devote to his race’s most noble tradition;
+     Or in Emmet or Davis, or, last on their list, in O’Brien.
+
+     ‘Beats fitfully, feebly. O desolate mother! O Erin!
+     When shall the pulse of thy life, which but flutters  in
+     Connaucht,
+     Throb through thy meadows and boglands, and mountains and
+     cities?’
+
+A subdued murmur of applause greeted the close of the recitation, and
+praise more sincere than that with which politeness generally greets the
+drawing-room performances of minor poets. Hyacinth joined in neither.
+It seemed to him that the verses were too beautiful to speak about, so
+sacred that praise was a kind of sacrilege. Perhaps some excuse may be
+found for his emotion in the fact that for weeks he had heard no poetry
+except the ode about ‘wiping something off a slate.’ The violence of the
+contrast benumbed his critical faculty. So a man who was obliged to gaze
+for a long time at the new churches erected in Belfast might afterwards
+catch himself in the act of admiring the houses which the Congested
+Districts Board builds in Connaught.
+
+‘I am afraid I must have bored you.’ It was Miss O’Dwyer who greeted
+him. ‘I didn’t see you and Mr. Maguire come in until I had commenced my
+poor little poem. I ought to have given you some tea before I inflicted
+it on you.’
+
+‘Oh,’ said Hyacinth, ‘it was beautiful. Is it really your own? Did you
+write it?’
+
+Miss O’Dwyer flushed. The vehement sincerity of his tone embarrassed
+her, though she was accustomed to praise.
+
+‘You are very kind,’ she said. ‘All my friends here are far too kind to
+me. But come now, I must give you some tea.’
+
+The tea was nearly stone cold and weak with frequent waterings. The
+saucer and spoon, possibly even the cup, had been used by someone else
+before. Mr. Maguire secured for himself the last remaining morsel of
+cake, leaving Hyacinth the choice between a gingerbread biscuit and
+a torn slice of bread and butter. None of these things appeared to
+embarrass Miss O’Dwyer. They did not matter in the least to Hyacinth.
+
+‘Do you know the West well?’ he asked.
+
+‘Indeed, I do not. I’ve always longed to go and spend a whole long
+summer there, but I’ve never had the chance.’
+
+‘Then how did you know it was like that? I mean, how did you catch the
+spirit of it in your poem?’
+
+‘Did I?’ she said. ‘I am so glad. But I don’t deserve any credit for
+it. I wrote those verses after I had been looking at one of Jim Tynan’s
+pictures. You know them, of course? No? Oh, but you must go and see them
+at once if you love the West. And you do, don’t you?’
+
+‘It is my home,’ said Hyacinth.
+
+When he had finished his tea she introduced him to some of the people
+who were in the room. Afterwards he came to know them, but the memories
+which Miss O’Dwyer’s verses called up in him made him absent and
+preoccupied. He scarcely heard the names she spoke. Soon the party broke
+up, and Hyacinth turned to look for Maguire.
+
+‘I’m afraid Mr. Maguire has gone,’ said Miss O’Dwyer. ‘He has a lecture
+to attend this afternoon. You must come here again, Mr. Conneally. Come
+next Wednesday--every Wednesday, if you like. We can have a talk about
+the West. I shall want you to tell me all sorts of things. Perhaps
+Finola will be here next week. She very often comes. I shall look
+forward to introducing you to her. You are sure to admire her immensely.
+We all do.’
+
+‘Yes, I’ve heard of her,’ said Hyacinth. ‘Mr. Maguire told me who she
+was.’
+
+‘Oh, but he couldn’t have told you half. She is magnificent. All the
+rest of us are only little children compared to her. Now be sure you
+come and meet her.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+Ever since Pitt and Castlereagh perpetrated their Act of Union two
+political parties have struggled together in Ireland. Both of them have
+been steadily prominent, so prominent that they have sometimes attracted
+the attention of the English public, and drawn to their contest a little
+quite unintelligent interest. The simplest and most discernible line
+of division between them is a religious one. The Protestant party has
+hitherto been guided and led by the gentry. It has been steadily loyal
+to England and to the English Government. It has not been greatly
+concerned about Ireland or Ireland’s welfare, but has been consistently
+anxious to preserve its own privileges, powers, and property. It has not
+come well out of the struggle of the nineteenth century. Its Church has
+been disestablished, its privileges and powers abolished, and the last
+remnants of its property are being filched from it. It is a curious
+piece of irony that this party should have hastened its own defeat
+by the very policy adopted to secure victory. No doubt the Irish
+aristocracy would have suffered less if they had been seditious instead
+of loyal. The Roman Catholic party has been led by ecclesiastics, and
+has always included the bulk of the people. Its leaders have not cared
+for the welfare of Ireland any more than the Protestant party, but they
+have always pretended that they did, being in this respect much wiser
+than their opponents. They have pulled the strings of a whole series of
+political movements, and made puppets dance on and off the stage as they
+chose. Also they have understood how to deal with England. Unlike the
+Protestant party, they have never been loyal, because they knew from the
+first that England gives most to those who bully or worry her. They have
+kept one object steadily in view, an object quite as selfish in reality
+as that of the aristocracy--the aggrandisement of their Church. For
+this they have been prepared at any time to sacrifice the interests
+of Ireland, and are content at the present moment to watch the country
+bleeding to death with entire complacency. The leaders of this party
+enter upon the twentieth century in sight of their promised land. They
+possess all the power and nearly all the wealth of Ireland. If the
+Bishops can secure the continuance of English government for the next
+half-century Ireland will have become the Church’s property. Her
+money will go to propagating the faith. Her children will supply the
+English-speaking world with a superfluity of priests and nuns.
+
+Outside both parties there have always been a few men united by no ties
+of policy or religion, unless, as perhaps we may, we call patriotism
+a kind of religion. Other lands have been loved sincerely, devotedly,
+passionately, as mothers, wives, and mistresses are loved. Ireland alone
+has been loved religiously, as men are taught to love God or the
+saints. Her lovers have called themselves Catholic or Protestant: such
+distinctions have not mattered to these men. They have scarcely ever
+been able to form themselves into a party, never into a strong or a wise
+party. They have been violent, desperate, frequently ridiculous, but
+always sincere and unselfish. Their great weakness has lain in the fact
+that they have had no consistent aim. Some of their leaders have looked
+for a return to Ireland’s Constitution, and built upon the watchword of
+the volunteers, ‘The King, the Lords, and the Commons of Ireland.’ Some
+have dreamed of a complete independence, of an Irish republic shaping
+its own world policy. Some have wholly distrusted politics, and given
+their strength to the intellectual, spiritual, or material regeneration
+of the people. Among these men have been found the sanest practical
+reformers and the wildest revolutionary dreamers. On the outskirts of
+their company have hung all sorts of people. Parliamentary politicians
+have leaned towards them, and been driven straightway out of public
+life. Criminals have claimed fellowship with them, and brought
+discredit upon honourable men. Poets and men of letters have drawn
+their inspiration from their strivings, and in return have decked their
+patriotism with imperishable splendour. In the future, no doubt,
+the struggle will lie between this party and the hitherto victorious
+hierarchy, with England for ally, and the fight seems a wholly unequal
+one. It was into an advanced and vehement group of patriots that Mary
+O’Dwyer introduced Hyacinth. He became a regular reader of the _Croppy_,
+and made the acquaintance of most of the contributors to its pages. He
+found them clever, enthusiastic, and agreeable men and women, but, as
+he was forced to admit to himself, occasionally reckless. One evening a
+discussion took place in Mary O’Dwyer’s room which startled and shocked
+him. Excitement ran high over the events of the war. The sympathies
+of the ‘Independent Irelanders,’ as they called themselves, fiercely
+assertive even in their name, were of course entirely with the Boers,
+and they received every report of an English reverse with unmixed
+satisfaction.
+
+When Hyacinth entered the room he found four people there. Mary
+O’Dwyer herself was making tea at a little table near the fire. Augusta
+Goold--the famous Finola--was stretched in a deep chair smoking
+a cigarette. She was a remarkable woman both physically and
+intellectually. It was her delight to emphasize her splendid figure
+by draping it in brilliant reds and yellows. To anyone who cared to
+speculate on such a subject it seemed a mystery why her clothes remained
+on her when she walked. The laws of gravity seemed to demand that they
+should loosen with her movements, become detached, and finally drop
+down. Nothing of the sort had ever happened, so it must be presumed that
+she had secret and unconventional ways of fastening them. Similarly it
+was not easy to see why her hair stayed upon her head. It was arranged
+upon no recognised system, and suggested that she had perfected the art,
+known generally only to heroines of romances, of twisting her tresses
+with a single movement into a loose knot. That she affected white frills
+of immense complexity was frequently evident, owing to the difficulty
+she experienced in confining her long legs to feminine attitudes.
+Her complexion put it in the power of her enemies to accuse her of
+familiarity with cosmetics--a slander, for she had been observed to turn
+green during an attack of sea-sickness. She had great brilliant eyes,
+which were capable of expressing intensity of enthusiasm or hatred,
+but no one had ever seen them soften with any emotion like love. Her
+attitude towards social conventions was symbolized by her clothes. In
+the old days, when the houses of ‘society’ had still been open to her,
+she was accustomed to challenge criticism by fondling a pet monkey
+at tea-parties. Since she had lost caste by taking up the cause of
+‘Independent Ireland’ the ape had been discarded, and the same result
+achieved by occasional bickerings with the police. She was an able
+public speaker, and could convince her audiences for a time of the
+reasonableness of opinions which next morning appeared to be the outcome
+of delirium. She wrote, not, like Mary O’Dwyer, verse in which any
+sentiment may be excused, but incisive and vigorous prose. Occasionally
+even the Castle officials got glimmerings of the meaning of one of her
+articles, and suppressed the whole issue of the _Croppy_ in which it
+appeared.
+
+Near her sat a much less remarkable person--Thomas Grealy, historian
+and archaeologist. He had been engaged for many years on a history of
+Ireland, but no volume of it had as yet appeared. His friends suspected
+that he had got permanently stuck somewhere about the period of the
+introduction of Christianity into the island. His essays, published in
+the _Croppy_, dwelt with passionate regret on the departed glories
+of Tara. He held strong views about the historical reality of the
+Tuath-de-Danaan, and got irritated at the most casual mention of Dr.
+Petrie’s theory of the round towers. He had proved that King Arthur
+was an Irishman, with whose reputation Malory and Tennyson had taken
+unwarrantable liberties. The name of Dante brought a smile of contempt
+to his lips, for he knew that the ‘Purgatorio’ was stolen shamelessly
+from the works of a monk of Cong. He nourished a secret passion for
+Finola. He never ventured to declare it, but his imagination endowed
+every heroine, from Queen Maev down to the foster daughter of the
+Leinster farmer who married King Cormac, with Miss Goold’s figure, eyes
+and hair. It was perhaps the burning of this passion which rendered him
+so cadaverous that his clothes--in other respects also they looked as
+if they had been bought in far-off happier days--hung round him like the
+covering of a broken-ribbed umbrella.
+
+The fourth person present was Timothy Halloran, who hovered about Mary
+O’Dwyer’s tea-table. He was what the country people call a ‘spoilt
+priest.’ Destined by simple and pious parents to take Holy Orders, he
+got as far as the inside of Maynooth College. While there he had kicked
+a fellow-student down the whole length of a long corridor for telling
+tales to the authorities. A committee of ecclesiastics considered the
+case, and having come to the conclusion that he lacked vocation for
+the priesthood, sent him home. Timothy was accustomed to say that his
+violence might have been passed over, but that his failure to appreciate
+the devotion to duty which inspired the tale-bearer marked him
+decisively as unfit for ordination. He never regretted his expulsion,
+although he complained bitterly that he had been nearly choked before
+they cast him out. He meant, it is to be supposed, that the effort to
+instil a proper reverence for dogma had almost destroyed his capacity
+for thought, not that the fingers of the reverend professors had
+actually closed around his windpipe. His subsequent experiences had
+included a period of teaching in an English Board School, a brief, but
+not wholly unsatisfactory, career as a political organizer in New
+York, and a return to Ireland, where he earned a precarious living as a
+journalist.
+
+All four greeted Hyacinth warmly as he entered the room.
+
+‘We were just discussing,’ said Mary O’Dwyer, ‘the failure of our
+attempt to organize a field hospital and a staff of nurses for the
+Boers. It is a shame to have to admit that the English garrison in
+Ireland can raise thousands of pounds for their war funds, and the Irish
+can’t be got to subscribe a few hundreds.’
+
+‘The wealth of the country,’ said Grealy, ‘is in the hands of a
+minority--the so-called Loyalists.’
+
+‘Nonsense,’ said Finola sharply. ‘If you ever gave a thought to anything
+more recent than the High-King’s Court at Tara you would know that the
+landlords are not the wealthy part of the community any longer. There’s
+many a provincial publican calling himself a Nationalist who could buy
+up the nearest landlord and every Protestant in the parish along with
+him. I’m a Protestant myself, born and bred among the class you speak
+of, and I know.’
+
+‘You’re quite right, Miss Goold,’ said Tim. ‘The people could have given
+the money if they liked. I attribute the failure of the fund to the
+apathy or treachery of the priests, call it which you like. There isn’t
+a Protestant church in the country where the parsons don’t preach “Give
+give, give” to their people Sunday after Sunday. And what’s the result?
+Why, they have raised thousands of pounds.’
+
+‘After the poem you published in last week’s _Croppy_,’ said Hyacinth
+to Mary O’Dwyer, ‘I made sure the subscriptions would have come in. Your
+appeal was one of the most beautiful things I ever read. It would have
+touched the heart of a stone.’
+
+‘Poetry is all well enough,’ said Tim. ‘I admire your verses, Mary,
+as much as anyone, but we want a collection at every church door after
+Mass. That’s what we ought to have, but it’s exactly what we won’t get,
+because the priests are West Britons at heart. They would pray for the
+Queen and the army to-morrow, like Cardinal Vaughan, if they weren’t
+afraid.’
+
+‘I believe,’ said Finola, ‘that we went the wrong way about the thing
+altogether. We asked for a hospital, and we appealed to the people’s
+pity for the wounded Boers. Nobody in Ireland cares a pin about
+the Boers. Why on earth should we? From all I can hear they are a
+narrow-minded, intolerant set of hypocrites. I’d just as soon read the
+stuff some fool of an English newspaper man wrote about “our brother the
+Boer” as listen to the maudlin sentiment our people talk. We don’t want
+to help the Boers. We want to hurt the English.’
+
+‘And you think----’ said Grealy.
+
+‘I think,’ went on Finola, ‘that we ought to have asked for volunteers
+to go out and fight, instead of nurses to cocker up the men who are
+fools enough to get themselves shot. We’d have got them.’
+
+‘You would not,’ said Tim. ‘The clergy would have been dead against you.
+They would have nipped the whole project in the bud without so much as
+making a noise in doing it.’
+
+‘That’s true,’ said Grealy. ‘Remember, Miss Goold, it was the priests
+who cursed Tara, and the monks who broke the power of the Irish Kings. I
+haven’t worked the thing out yet, but I mean to show----’
+
+Finola interrupted the poor man ruthlessly:
+
+‘Let’s try it, anyway. Let’s preach a crusade.’
+
+‘Not the least bit of good,’ said Tim. ‘Every blackguard in the country
+is enlisted already in the Connaught Bangers or the Dublin Fusiliers,
+or some confounded Militia regiment. There’s nobody left but the nice,
+respectable, goody-goody boys who wouldn’t leave their mothers or miss
+going to confession if you went down on your knees to them.’
+
+‘Well, then, the Irish troops ought to shoot their officers, and walk
+over to the Boer camp,’ said Finola savagely.
+
+Hyacinth half smiled at what seemed to him a monstrous jest. Then, when
+he perceived that she was actually in earnest, the smile froze into a
+kind of grin. His hands trembled with the violence of his indignation.
+
+‘It would be devilish treachery,’ he blurted out. ‘The name of Irishman
+will never be disgraced by such an act.’
+
+Augusta Goold flung her cigarette into the grate, and rose from her
+chair. She stood over Hyacinth, her hands clenched and her bosom heaving
+rapidly. Her eyes blazed down into his until their scorn cowed him.
+
+‘There is no treachery possible for an Irishman,’ she said, ‘except
+the one of fighting for England. Any deed against England--yes, _any_
+deed--is glorious, and not shameful.’
+
+Hyacinth was utterly quelled. He ventured upon no reply. Indeed, not
+only did her violence render argument undesirable--and it seemed for
+the moment that he would find himself in actual grips with a furious
+Amazon--but her words carried with them a certain conviction. It
+actually seemed to him while she spoke as if a good defence might be
+made for Irish soldiers who murdered their officers and deserted to an
+enemy in the field. It was not until hours afterwards, when the vivid
+impression of Finola’s face had faded from his recollection, when he had
+begun to forget the flash of her eyes, the poise of her figure, and the
+glow of her draperies, that his moral sense was able to reassert itself.
+Then he knew that she had spoken wickedly. It might be right for an
+Irishman to fight against England when he could. It might be justifiable
+to seize the opportunity of England’s embarrassment to make a bid for
+freedom by striking a blow at the Empire. So far his conscience went
+willingly, but that treachery and murder could ever be anything but
+horrible he refused altogether to believe.
+
+Another conversation in which he took part about this time helped
+Hyacinth still further to understand the position of his new friends.
+Tim Halloran and he were smoking and chatting together over the fire
+when Maguire joined them.
+
+‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Halloran. ‘You look as if you’d been
+at your mother’s funeral.’
+
+‘You’re not so far out in your guess,’ said Maguire grimly. ‘I spent the
+morning at my sister’s wedding. Would you like a bit of the cake?’ He
+produced from his pocket a paper containing crushed fragments of white
+sugar and a shapeless mass of citron and currants. ‘With the compliments
+of the Reverend Mother,’ he said. ‘Try a bit.’
+
+‘What on earth do you mean?’ said Hyacinth.
+
+‘Oh, I assure you the Sisters of Pity do these things in style,’ said
+Maguire. ‘It’s a pretty fancy, that of the wedding-cake, isn’t it?
+But you’re a Protestant, Conneally; you don’t understand this delicate
+playfulness. I was present to-day at the reception of my only sister
+into the Institute of the Catholic Sisters of Pity, founded by Honoria
+Kavanagh. I’ve lost Birdie Maguire, that’s all, the little girl that
+used to climb on to my knee and kiss me, and instead of her there’s a
+Sister Monica Mary, who will no doubt pray for my soul when she’s let.’
+
+‘What was the figure in her case?’ asked Tim in a perfectly
+matter-of-fact tone.
+
+‘Six hundred pounds,’ said Maguire. ‘It must have put the old man to the
+pin of his collar to pay it. The only time he ever talked to me about
+his affairs he told me he had got four hundred pounds put by for
+Birdie’s fortune, and that I was to have my medical course and whatever
+the old shop would fetch when he was gone. They must have put the screw
+on pretty tight to make him spring the extra two hundred. I dare say I
+shall suffer for it in the end. He must have borrowed the money.’
+
+Hyacinth felt intensely curious about this young nun. Like most
+Protestants he had grown up to regard monasticism in all its forms as
+something remote, partly horrible, wholly unintelligible.
+
+‘Why did she do it?’ he asked. ‘What sort of a girl was she? Do you mind
+telling me?’
+
+‘Not in the least,’ said Maguire. ‘Only I’m not sure that I know. Three
+years ago--that is, when I left home--she was the last sort of girl you
+could imagine going into a convent. She was pretty, fond of nice clothes
+and admiration, as keen as every girl ought to be on a dance. I never
+supposed she had a thought of religion in her head--I mean, beyond the
+usual confessions and attendances at Mass.’
+
+‘I suppose,’ said Hyacinth, ‘your people wanted it.’
+
+‘I don’t think so,’ said Maguire. ‘Perhaps my mother did. I don’t know.’
+
+‘You see, Conneally,’ said Tim Halloran, ‘it is a sort of hall-mark
+of respectability among people like Maguire’s to have a girl in a good
+convent. A little lower down in the social scale, in the class I come
+from, the boys are made priests. A doctor is a more expensive article to
+manufacture, so Maguire’s father selected that line of life for him. Not
+that they could have made a priest of you, Maguire, in any case. You’d
+have disgraced Maynooth, as I did.’
+
+‘I don’t understand,’ said Hyacinth. ‘I thought a vocation for the life
+was necessary.’
+
+‘Oh, so it is,’ said Tim Halloran, ‘but, you see, there’s the period of
+the novitiate. Given a girl at an impressionable age, the proper convent
+atmosphere, and a prize of six hundred pounds for the Order, and it
+will go hard with the Reverend Mother if she can’t work the girl up to
+a vocation. It takes a man a lifetime to make six hundred pounds in
+a country shop, but there’s many a one who does it by hard work and
+self-denial; then down come the nuns and sweep it away, and it’s
+wasted. It ought to be invested in a local factory or in waterworks, or
+gas-works, or fifty other things that would benefit the town it’s made
+in. It ought to be fructifying and bearing interest; instead of which
+off it goes to Munich for stained glass, or to Italy for a marble altar.
+Is it any wonder Ireland is crying out with poverty?’
+
+‘Yes,’ said Maguire, ‘and that’s not the worst of it. I’d be content to
+let them take the damned money and deck their churches with it, but the
+girls--there are hundreds of them caught every year for nuns, and swept
+out of life. It isn’t the Irish convents alone that get them. American
+nuns come over and Australian nuns, and they go round and round the
+country picking up girls here and there, and carry them off. There,
+I don’t want to talk too much about it. The money is nothing, but the
+girls and boys----’
+
+‘It seems strange to me,’ said Hyacinth, ‘that when you think that way
+you should go on belonging to your Church.’
+
+‘Desert the Church!’ said Maguire. ‘We’ll never do that. How could we
+live without religion? And what other religion is there? I grant you
+that your priests wouldn’t rob us, but--but think of the cold of it.
+You can’t realize it, Conneally, but think what it would mean to
+a Catholic--a religion without saints, without absolution, without
+sacrifice. Besides, what we complain of is not Catholicism. It’s a
+parasitic growth destroying the true faith, defiling the Church.’
+
+‘Yes,’ said Tim Halloran, ‘and even from my point of view how should we
+be the better of a change? Your Church is ruled by old women who think
+the name of Englishman the most glorious in the world. You preach
+loyalty, and I believe you pray for the Queen in your services. A nice
+fool I would feel praying that the Queen should have victory over her
+enemies.’
+
+For a long time afterwards this conversation dwelt in Hyacinth’s mind.
+Tim Halloran he knew to be practically a freethinker, but Maguire
+regularly heard Mass on Sundays, and often went to confession. It was a
+puzzle how he could do so, feeling as he did about the religious Orders.
+So insistent did the problem become to his mind that he found himself
+continually leading the conversation round to it from one side or
+another. Mary O’Dwyer told him that she also had a sister in a nunnery.
+
+‘She teaches girls to make lace, and wonderful work they do. She is
+perfectly happy. I think her face is the sweetest and most beautiful
+thing I have ever seen. There is not a line on it of care or of
+fretfulness. It seems to me as if her whole life might be described as
+a quiet smile. I always feel better by the mere recollection of her face
+for a long time after I have visited her. Oh, I know it wouldn’t do
+for me. I couldn’t stand it for a week. I should go mad with the quiet
+restraint of it all. But my sister is happy. I can’t forget that. I
+suppose she has a vocation.’
+
+‘Vocation,’ said Hyacinth thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I can understand how that
+would make all the difference. But how many of them have the vocation?’
+
+‘Don’t you think vocation might be learnt? I mean mightn’t one grow into
+it, if one wished to very much, and if the life was constantly before
+one’s eyes, beautiful and calm?’
+
+It was almost the same thought which Timothy Halloran had suggested.
+Mary O’Dwyer spoke of growing into vocation, Tim of the working of it
+up. Was there any difference except a verbal one?
+
+On another occasion he spoke to Dr. Henry about the position of the
+Church of Ireland in the country.
+
+‘We have proved,’ said the professor, ‘that the Roman claims have no
+support in Scripture, history, or reason. Our books remain unanswered,
+because they are unanswerable. We can do no more.’
+
+‘We might offer the Irish people a Church which they could join,’ said
+Hyacinth.
+
+‘We do. We offer them the Church of St. Patrick, the ancient, historic
+Church of Ireland. We offer them the two Sacraments of the Gospel,
+administered by priests duly ordained at the hands of an Episcopate
+which goes back in an unbroken line to the Apostles. We present them the
+three great creeds for their assent. We use a liturgy that is at once
+ancient and pure. The Church of Ireland has all this, is beyond dispute
+a branch of the great Catholic Church of Christ.’
+
+‘It may be all you say,’ said Hyacinth, ‘but it is not national. In
+sentiment and sympathy it is English and not Irish.’
+
+‘I know what you mean,’ said Dr. Henry. ‘I think I understand how you
+feel, but I cannot consent to the conclusion you want to draw. There
+is no real meaning in the cry for nationality. It is a sentiment, a
+fashion, and will pass. Even if it were genuine and enduring, I hold it
+to be better for Ireland to be an integral part of a great Empire than a
+contemptible and helpless item among the nations of the world, a prey to
+the intrigues of ambitious foreign statesmen.’
+
+Hyacinth sighed and turned to go, but Dr. Henry laid a hand upon his
+shoulder and detained him.
+
+‘Conneally,’ he said kindly, ‘let me give you a word of advice. Don’t
+mix yourself up with your new friends too much. You will ruin your own
+prospects in life if you do. There is nothing more fatal to a man among
+the people with whom you and I are to live and work than the suspicion
+of being tainted with Nationalist ideas. You can’t be both a rebel and
+a clergyman. You see,’ he added with a smile, ‘I take enough interest in
+you to know who your friends are, and what you are thinking about.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Augusta Goold’s scheme for enrolling Irish volunteers to help the Boers
+was duly set forth in the next issue of the _Croppy_. It included two
+appeals--one for money and one for men. The details were worked out
+with the frank contempt for possibility which characterizes some of the
+famous suggestions of Dean Swift. She had the same faculty that he had
+for bringing absurdities within the range of the commonplace; but there
+was this difference between them--Miss Goold quite believed in her own
+plans, while the great Dean no doubt grinned over the proof-sheets of
+his ‘Modest Proposal.’
+
+It happened, most unfortunately, that the appeal synchronized with
+another, also for funds, which was issued by Mr. O’Rourke, the leader
+of the Parliamentary party. Since the death of John O’Neill the purse
+of the party had been getting lean. The old tactics which used to draw
+plaudits and dollars from the United States, as well as a tribute from
+every parish in Ireland, had lately been unsuccessful. There were still
+violent scenes in the House of Commons, but they no longer produced
+anything except contemptuous smiles. Members of Parliament still
+succeeded occasionally in getting the Chief Secretary to imprison them,
+but the glory of martyrdom was harder to win than in the old days.
+Latterly things had come to such a pass that even the reduced stipends
+offered to the members fell into arrear. The attendance at Westminster
+dropped away. The Government could afford to smile at Mr. O’Rourke’s
+efforts to make himself disagreeable, and the Opposition were frankly
+contemptuous of a people who could not profit them by more than a dozen
+votes in a critical division. It became impossible to wring even a
+modest Land Bill from the Prime Minister, and Mr. Chesney, now much at
+ease in the Secretary’s office in the Castle, scarcely felt it necessary
+to be civil to deputations which wanted railways. It was clear that
+something must be done, or Mr. O’Rourke’s business would disappear.
+He decided to appeal for funds _orbi et urbi_. The world--in this case
+North America--was to be visited, exhorted, and, it was hoped, taxed by
+some of his most eloquent lieutenants. Even Canada, with its leaven
+of Orangemen, was to be honoured with the speeches of an orator of
+second-rate powers. The city--Dublin, of course--was the chosen scene of
+the leader’s personal exertions. Since his revolt against John O’Neill,
+O’Rourke had been a little shy of Dublin audiences, but the pressing
+nature of the present crisis almost forced him to pay his court to the
+capital. He found some comfort in the recollection that during the five
+years that had elapsed since O’Neill’s death he had missed no public
+opportunity of shedding tears beside his tomb. He remembered, too, that
+he had put his name down for a large subscription towards the erection
+of a statue to the dead leader, a work of art which the existing
+generation seemed unlikely to have the pleasure of seeing.
+
+Thus it happened that on the very day of the publication of Miss Goold’s
+scheme Mr. O’Rourke announced his intention of addressing an appeal for
+funds to a public meeting in the Rotunda. Miss Goold was disconcerted
+and irritated. She was well aware that Mr. O’Rourke’s appeal would give
+the respectable Nationalists an excellent excuse for ignoring hers, and
+unfortunately the respectable people are just the ones who have most
+money. She was confident that she could rely on the extreme section of
+the Nationalists, and on that element in the city population which loves
+and makes a row, but she could not count on the moneyed classes. They
+were, so far as their words went, very enthusiastic for the Boer
+cause; but when it came to writing cheques, it was likely that the
+counter-attractions of the Parliamentary fund would prove too strong.
+
+Since it seemed that Mr. O’Rourke would certainly spoil her collection,
+the obvious thing to do was to try to spoil his. If he afforded people
+an excuse for not paying the travelling expenses of her volunteers to
+Lorenzo Marques, she would, if possible, suggest a way of escape from
+paying for his men’s journeys to London. After all, no one really wanted
+to subscribe to either fund, and it might be supposed that the public
+would very gladly keep their purses shut altogether.
+
+For an Irishman it is quite possible to be genuinely enthusiastic and at
+the same time able to see the humorous side of his own enthusiasm. This
+is a reason why an Irishman is never a bore unless, to gain his private
+ends, he wants to be. Even an Irish advocate of total abstinence, or an
+Irish antivaccinationist, if such a thing exists, is not a bore,
+because he will always trot out his conscientious objections with a
+half-humorous, half-deprecating smile. This same capacity for avoiding
+the slavery of serious fanaticism enables an Irishman to cease quite
+joyfully from the pursuit of his own particular fad in order to corner
+an obnoxious opponent. Thus Augusta Goold and her friends were genuinely
+desirous of striking a blow at England, and really believed that their
+volunteers might do it; but this did not prevent them from finding
+infinite relish in the prospect of watching Mr. O’Rourke squirming on
+the horns of a dilemma. They took counsel together, and the result of
+their deliberations was peculiar. They proposed to invite Mr. O’Rourke
+to join his appeal to theirs, to pool the money which came in, and to
+divide it evenly between the volunteers and the members of Parliament.
+It was Tim Halloran who hit upon the brilliant idea. Augusta Goold
+chuckled over it as she grasped its consequences. Mr. O’Rourke, Tim
+argued, would be unwilling to accept the proposal because he wanted all
+the money he could get, more than was at all likely to be collected.
+He would be equally unwilling to reject it, because he could then be
+represented as indifferent to the heroic struggle of the Boers. In
+the existing state of Irish and American opinion a suspicion of such
+indifference would be quite sufficient to wreck his chances of getting
+any money at all.
+
+Of course, the obvious way of making such a proposal would have been by
+letter to Mr. O’Rourke. Afterwards the correspondence--he must make a
+reply of some sort--could be sent to the press, and sufficient publicity
+would be given to the matter. This was what Tim Halloran wanted to do,
+but such a course did not commend itself to Augusta Goold. It lacked
+dramatic possibilities, and there was always the chance that the leading
+papers might refuse to take any notice of the matter, or relegate
+the letters to a back page and small print. Besides, a mere newspaper
+controversy would not make a strong appeal to the section of the Dublin
+populace on whose support she chiefly relied. A much more attractive
+plan suggested itself. Augusta Goold, with a few friends to act as
+aides-de-camp, would present herself to Mr. O’Rourke at his Rotunda
+meeting, and put the proposal to him then and there in the presence of
+the audience.
+
+In the meantime the few days before the meeting were occupied in
+scattering suggestive seed over the hoardings and blank walls of the
+city. One morning people were startled by the sight of an immense
+placard which asked in violent red letters, ‘What is Ireland going
+to do?’ Public opinion was divided about the ultimate purpose of the
+poster. The majority expected the announcement of a new play or novel;
+a few held that a pill or a cocoa would be recommended. Next morning the
+question became more explicit, and the hypothesis of the play and the
+pill were excluded. ‘What,’ the new poster ran, ‘is Ireland going to do
+for the Boers?’ The public were not intensely anxious to find an answer
+to the conundrum thrust thus forcibly on their attention, but they
+became curious to know who the advertisers were who hungered for the
+information. Men blessed by Providence with sagacious-looking faces made
+the most of their opportunity, and informed their friends that the thing
+was a new dodge of O’Rourke’s to get money. Their reputation suffered
+when the next placard appeared. The advertisers had apparently changed
+their minds, for what they now wanted to know was, ‘What are the Irish
+M.P.’s going to do for the Boers?’ Clearly Mr. O’Rourke could have
+nothing to gain by insisting on an answer to such a question. The public
+were puzzled but pleased. The bill-stickers of the city foresaw
+the possibility of realizing a competence, for the next morning the
+satisfied inquirers published the result of their investigations. ‘The
+Em Pees ‘(it was thus that they now referred to the honourable members
+of Parliament) ‘are supporting the infamies of England.’ It was at
+this point that the eye of a Castle official was caught by one of the
+placards as he made his way to the Kildare Street Club for luncheon.
+He discussed the matter with a colleague, and it occurred to them that
+since they were paid for governing Ireland, they ought to give the
+public some value for their money, and seize the opportunity of doing
+something. They sent a series of telegrams to Mr. Chesney’s London
+house, which were forwarded by his private secretary to the Riviera.
+The replies which followed kept the Castle officials in a state of
+pleasurable excitement until quite late in the evening. At about eight
+o’clock large numbers of Metropolitan police sallied out of their
+barracks and tore down the last batch of placards. Next morning fresh
+ones were posted up, each of which bore the single word, ‘Why?’ The
+bill-stickers were highly pleased, and many of them were arrested for
+drunkenness. Mr. O’Rourke was much less pleased, for he began to guess
+what the answer was likely to be, and how it would affect his chances of
+securing a satisfactory collection. The officials were perplexed. They
+suspected the ‘Why?’ of containing within its three letters some hideous
+sedition, but it was not possible to deal vigorously with what might,
+after all, be only the cunning novelty of some advertising manufacturer.
+More telegrams harried Mr. Chesney, but before any definite course of
+action had been decided on the morning of the Rotunda meeting arrived,
+and with it an answer to the multifarious ‘Whys’: Because O’Rourke wants
+all the money to spend in the London restaurants.’ There was a great
+deal of laughter, and many people, quite uninterested in politics,
+determined to go to the meeting in hopes of more amusement.
+
+When Mr. O’Rourke took the chair the hall was crowded to its utmost
+capacity. Under ordinary circumstances this would have augured well for
+the success of his appeal, for it showed that the public were at all
+events not apathetic. On this particular occasion, however, Mr. O’Rourke
+would have been better pleased with a smaller audience. The placards
+had shown him that something unpleasant was likely to occur, though they
+afforded no hint of the form which the unpleasantness would take. When
+he rose to his feet he was greeted with the usual volley of cheers, and
+although some rude remarks about the Boers were made in the corners of
+the hall, they did not amount to anything like an organized attempt at
+interruption. He began his speech cautiously, feeling the pulse of
+his audience, and plying them with the well-worn platitudes of the
+Nationalist platform. When these evoked the usual enthusiasm he waxed
+bolder, and shot out some almost original epigrams directed against the
+Government, working up to a really new gibe about officials who sat
+like spiders spinning murderous webs in Dublin Castle. The audience
+were delighted with this, but their joy reached its height when someone
+shouted: ‘You might speak better of the men who tore down the placard
+on Wednesday.’ Mr. O’Rourke ignored the suggestion, and passed on to
+sharpen his wit upon the landlords. He described them as ‘ill-omened
+tax-gatherers who suck the life-blood of the country, and refuse to
+disgorge a penny of it for any useful purpose.’ Mr. O’Rourke was not a
+man who shrank from a mixed metaphor, or paused to consider such trifles
+as the unpleasantness which would ensue if anyone who had been sucking
+blood were to repent and disgorge it. ‘Where,’ he went on to ask, ‘do
+they spend their immense revenues? Is it in Ireland?’ Here he made one
+of those dramatic pauses for which his oratory was famous. The audience
+waited breathlessly for the denunciation which was to follow. They were
+treated, unexpectedly, to a well-conceived anticlimax. A voice spoke
+softly, but quite clearly, from the back of the hall:
+
+‘Bedad, and I shouldn’t wonder if it was in the London restaurants.’
+
+A roar of laughter followed. The orator might no doubt have made an
+effective reply, but every time he opened his mouth minor wits, rending
+like wolves the carcase of the original joke, yelled ‘turtle-soup’
+at him, or ‘champagne and oysters.’ He got angry, and consequently
+flurried. He tried to quell the tumult by thundering out the
+denunciation which he had prepared. But the delight which the audience
+took in shrieking the items of their imaginary bill of fare was too much
+for him. He forgot what he had meant to say, floundered, attempted to
+pull himself together, and brought out the stale jest about providing
+each landlord with a single ticket to Holyhead.
+
+‘And that same,’ said his original tormentor, ‘would be cheaper than
+giving you a return ticket to London.’
+
+The audience was immensely tickled. So far the entertainment, if not
+precisely novel, was better than anything they had hoped for, and
+everyone had an agreeable conviction that there was still something
+in the way of a sensation in store. Perhaps it was eagerness for the
+expected climax which induced them to keep tolerably quiet during the
+remainder of Mr. O’Rourke’s speech. He set forth at some length the
+glorious achievements of his party in the past, and explained the
+opportunities of future usefulness which lay to be grasped if only the
+necessary funds were provided. He sat down to make way, as he assured
+the audience, for certain tried and trusty soldiers of the cause who
+were waiting to propose important resolutions. So far as these
+warriors were concerned, he might as well have remained standing. Their
+resolutions are to this day unproposed and uncommended--a secret joy,
+no doubt, to those who framed them, but not endorsed by any popular
+approval.
+
+Hyacinth Conneally was not admitted to the secret councils of Augusta
+Goold and her friends. He knew no more than the general public what kind
+of a coup was meditated, but he gathered from Miss O’Dwyer’s nervous
+excitement and Tim Halloran’s air of immense and mysterious importance
+that something quite out of the common was likely to occur. By arriving
+an hour and a half before the opening of the meeting he secured a seat
+near the platform. He enjoyed the discomfiture of O’Rourke, whom he had
+learnt from the pages of the _Croppy_ to despise as a mere windbag, and
+to hate as the betrayer of O’Neill. A sudden thrill of excitement went
+through him when O’Rourke sat down. The whole audience turned their
+faces from the platform towards the door at the far end of the hall, and
+Hyacinth, without knowing exactly what he expected, turned too.
+There was a swaying visible among the crowd near the door, and almost
+immediately it became clear that someone was trying to force a way
+through the densely-packed people. Curses were to be heard, and even
+cries from those who were being trodden on. At last a way was made.
+Augusta Goold, followed by Grealy, Halloran, and Mary O’Dwyer, came
+slowly up the hall towards the platform. Those of the audience whose
+limbs had not been crushed or their feet mangled in preparation for her
+progress cheered her wildly. Indeed, she made a regal appeal to them.
+Even amidst a crowd of men her height made her conspicuous, and she had
+arrayed herself for the occasion in a magnificent violet robe. It flowed
+from her shoulders in spacious folds, and swept behind her, splendidly
+contemptuous of the part it played as scavenger amid the accumulated
+filth of the floor. Her bare arms shone out of the wide sleeves which
+hung around them. Her neck rose strong and stately over the silver clasp
+of a cloak which she had thrown back from her shoulders. She wore a hat
+which seemed to hold her hair captive from falling loose around her. One
+great tress alone escaped from it, and by some cunning manipulation was
+made to stand straight out, as if blown by the wind from its fastenings.
+In comparison her suite looked commonplace and mean. Poor Miss O’Dwyer
+was arrayed--‘gowned,’ she would have said herself in reporting the
+scene--in vesture not wanting in splendour, but which beside Miss
+Goold’s could not catch the eye. Thomas Grealy, awkward and stooped,
+peered through his glasses at the crowd. Tim Halloran walked jauntily,
+but his eyes glanced nervously from side to side. He was certainly ill
+at ease, possibly frightened, at the position in which he found himself.
+
+A hurried consultation took place among the gentlemen on the platform,
+which ended in Mr. O’Rourke stepping forward with a smile and an
+outstretched hand to welcome Augusta Goold as she ascended the steps.
+The expression of his face belied the smile which he had impressed upon
+his lips. His eyes had the same look of furtive malice as a dog’s
+which wants to bite but fears the stick. Augusta Goold waved aside the
+proffered hand, and stepped unaided on to the platform. Mr. O’Rourke
+placed a chair for her, but she ignored it and stood, with her followers
+behind her, facing the audience. O’Rourke and two of his tried and
+trusty members of Parliament approached her. They stood between her
+and the audience, and talked to her for some time, apparently very
+earnestly. Augusta Goold looked past them, over them, sometimes it
+seemed through them, while they spoke, but made them no answer whatever.
+At last Mr. O’Rourke shrugged his shoulders, and withdrew to his chair
+with a sulky scowl.
+
+‘I wish,’ said Augusta Goold, ‘to ask a simple question of your
+chairman.’
+
+Mr. O’Rourke rose.
+
+‘This meeting,’ he said, ‘is convened for the purpose of raising funds
+for the carrying on of the national business in the House of Commons. If
+Miss Goold’s question relates to the business in hand, I shall be most
+happy to answer it. If not, I am afraid I cannot allow it to be asked
+here. At another time and in another place I shall be prepared to listen
+to what Miss Goold has to say, and in the meantime if she will take her
+seat on the platform she will be heartily welcome.’
+
+‘My question,’ said Augusta Goold, ‘is intimately connected with the
+business of the meeting. It is simply this: Are you, Mr. O’Rourke,
+prepared to give any portion of the money entrusted to you by the Irish
+people to assist the Boers in their struggle for freedom?’
+
+It was manifestly absurd to ask such a question at all. Mr. O’Rourke
+had no intention of collecting money for the Boers, who seemed to have
+plenty of their own, and he could not without breach of trust have
+applied funds subscribed to feed and clothe members of Parliament to
+arming volunteers. Nevertheless, it was an awkward question to answer
+in the presence of an audience excited by Augusta Goold’s beauty and
+splendid audacity. A really strong man, like, for instance, O’Rourke’s
+predecessor, John O’Neill, might have faced the situation, and won, if
+not the immediate cheers, at least the respect of the Irish people. But
+Mr. O’Rourke was not a strong man, and besides he was out of temper and
+had lost his nerve. He took perhaps the worst course open to him: he
+made a speech. He appealed to his past record as a Nationalist, and to
+his publicly reiterated expressions of sympathy with the Boer cause.
+He asked the audience to trust him to do what was right, but he neither
+said Yes nor No to the question he was asked.
+
+Augusta Goold stood calm and impassive while he spoke. A sneer gathered
+on her lips and indrawn nostrils as he made his appeal for the people’s
+confidence. When he had finished she said, very slowly, and with that
+extreme distinctness of articulation which women speakers seem to learn
+so much more easily than men:
+
+‘Are you prepared to give any portion of the money entrusted to you by
+the Irish people to assist the Boers in their struggle for freedom?’
+
+Mr. O’Rourke was goaded into attempting another speech, but the audience
+was in no mood to listen to him. He was interrupted again and again with
+shouts of ‘Yes or no!’ ‘Answer the question!’ The bantering tone with
+which they had plied him earlier in the evening with suggestions for a
+menu had changed now into angry insistence. He passed his hand over his
+forehead with a gesture of despair, and sat down. At once the tumult
+ceased, and the people waited breathless for Augusta Goold to speak
+again.
+
+‘Are you prepared’--she seemed to have learnt her question off by
+heart--‘to give any portion of the money entrusted to you by the Irish
+people to assist the Boers in their struggle for freedom?’
+
+Mr. Shea, a red-headed member of Parliament from Co. Limerick, being
+himself one of those most deeply interested in the contents of the
+party’s purse, sprang to his feet. It was clear that he was in a
+condition of almost dangerous excitement, for he stammered, as he
+shouted to the chairman:
+
+‘Sir, is this--this--this woman to be allowed to interrupt the meeting?
+I demand her immediate removal.’
+
+Augusta Goold smiled at him. It was really a very gracious, almost a
+tender, smile. One might imagine the divine Theodora in her earlier days
+smiling with just such an expression on a plebeian lover whose passion
+she regarded as creditable to him but hopeless.
+
+‘I assure you, Mr. Shea, that I shall not interrupt the business for
+more than a minute. Mr. O’Rourke has only got to say one word--either
+Yes or No. Are you prepared to give any portion of the funds entrusted
+to you by the Irish people to assist the Boers in their struggle for
+freedom?’
+
+Mr. Shea was not at all mollified either by the smile or the politeness
+of her tone.
+
+‘We shall not permit the meeting to be interrupted any more,’ he
+shouted. ‘Either you will withdraw at once, or we shall have you removed
+by force.’
+
+She smiled at him again--a pitying smile, as if she regretted the
+petulance of his manner, and turned to the chairman.
+
+‘Are you prepared to give----’
+
+Then Mr. Shea’s feelings became too strong for his self-control. He
+sprang forward, apparently with the intention of laying violent hands
+upon Augusta Groold. Hyacinth Conneally started up to protect her, and
+the same impulse moved a large part of the audience. There was a rush
+for the platform, and a fierce, threatening yell. Mr. Shea hung back,
+frightened. Augusta Goold held up her hand, and immediately the rush
+stopped and the people were silent. She went on with her question,
+taking it up at the exact word which Mr. Shea had interrupted, in the
+same level and exquisitely irritating tone.
+
+‘--Any of the money entrusted to you by the Irish people to assist the
+Boers in their struggle for freedom?’
+
+Mr. O’Rourke had sat scowling silently since the failure of his last
+attempt to explain himself. This final disjointed repetition of the
+galling question roused him to the necessity of doing something. He
+was a pitiful sight as he rose and confronted Augusta Goold. There
+were blotches of purple red and spaces of pallor on his face; his hands
+twisted together; a sweat had broken out from his neck, and made his
+collar limp. His words were a stammering mixture of bluster and appeal.
+
+‘You mustn’t--mustn’t--mustn’t interrupt the meeting,’ So far he tried
+to assert himself, then, with a glance at the contemptuous face of the
+woman before him, he relapsed into the tone of a schoolboy who begs off
+the last strokes of a caning. ‘Is this nice conduct? Is it ladylike to
+come here and attack us like this? Miss Goold, I’m ashamed of you.’
+
+‘I am glad to hear,’ said Augusta Goold, departing for the first time
+from her question, ‘that there is anything left in the world that Mr.
+O’Rourke is ashamed of. I didn’t think there was.’
+
+It was Mr. Shea and not his leader who resented this last insult. His
+lips drew apart, leaving his teeth bare in a ghastly grin. He clenched
+his fists, and stood for a moment trembling from head to foot. Then he
+leaped forward towards Augusta Goold. The man who stood next Hyacinth
+lurched suddenly forward, wrenched his right hand free of the crowd
+round him, and flung it back behind his head. Hyacinth saw that he held
+a large stone in it.
+
+‘You are a cowardly blackguard, Shea,’ he yelled--‘a damned, cowardly
+blackguard! Would you strike a woman?’
+
+Shea turned on the instant, saw the hand stretched back to fling the
+stone. He seized the chair behind him--the very chair which, while an
+appearance of politeness was still possible, Mr. O’Rourke had offered
+to Augusta Goold--and flung it with all his force at the man with the
+stone. One of the legs grazed Hyacinth’s cheek, scraping the skin
+off. The corner of the seat struck the man beside him full across the
+forehead just above his eyes. The blood poured out, blinding, and then,
+as he gasped, choking him. He reeled and huddled together helplessly.
+He could not fall, for the pressure of the crowd round him held him up.
+Hyacinth felt his hands groping wildly as if for support, and reached
+out his own to grasp him. But the man wanted no help for himself. As
+soon as he felt another hand touch his he pressed the stone into it.
+
+‘I can’t see,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘Take it, you, and kill him, kill
+him, kill him! smash his skull!’
+
+Hyacinth took the stone. The feel of the man’s blood warm on it and the
+fierce yelling and stamping of the crowd filled him with a mad lust of
+hate against Shea, who stood as if suddenly paralyzed within a few feet
+of him. He wrenched his hand free, and with a mighty effort flung the
+stone. He saw it strike Shea fair on the forehead. In spite of the
+tumult around him, he fancied he heard the dull thud of its impact.
+He saw Shea fling up his hands and pitch forward. He saw Augusta Goold
+gather her skirts in her hand, and sweep them swiftly aside lest the man
+should fall on them. Then the crowd pressing towards the platform swept
+him off his feet, and he was tossed helplessly forward. A giddy
+sickness seized him. The pressure slackened for an instant, and he fell.
+Someone’s boot struck him on the head. He felt without any keen regret
+that he was likely to be trampled to death. Then he lost consciousness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Next morning the Dublin daily papers laid themselves out to make the
+most of the sensational fight at the Rotunda. Even the habitually
+cautious _Irish Times_ felt that the occasion justified the expression
+of an opinion, and that there would be no serious risk of alienating the
+sympathies of subscribers and advertisers by condemning the bloodshed.
+It published an exceedingly dignified and stodgy leading article,
+drawing the largest and finest words from the dictionary, and weaving
+them with extraordinary art into sentences which would have been
+creditable to anyone bent upon imitating the style of Dr. Samuel
+Johnson. The British Empire and the whole of civilized Europe were
+called upon to witness the unspeakably deplorable consequences which
+invariably followed the habitual neglect of the cultivation of the
+elementary decencies of public life. The paper disclaimed any sympathy
+with either of the belligerent parties, and pointed out with sorrowful
+solemnity that if the principles sedulously inculcated upon its readers
+in its own columns were persistently flouted and contemned by those who
+claimed the position of national representatives, little else except a
+repetition at frequent intervals of the painful and humiliating
+scenes of the night before could possibly be anticipated by reasonable
+observers of the general trend of democratic institutions. The _Daily
+Express_ openly exulted over the rioters. Its leading article--the
+staff may have danced in a ring round the office table while composing
+it--declared that now at length the Irish had proved to the world
+that they were all, without a solitary exception, irredeemably
+vicious corner-boys. Miss Augusta Goold was warmly praised for having
+demonstrated once for all that ‘patriotism’ ought to be written ‘Pat
+riotism.’ Deep regret was expressed that those who attended the meeting
+had not been armed with revolvers instead of stones, and that the
+platform had not been defended with Maxim guns instead of comparatively
+innocuous wooden chairs. Had modern weapons of precision been used the
+_Daily Express_ would have been able to congratulate mankind on getting
+rid of quite a considerable number of Irishmen.
+
+The _Freeman’s Journal_ and the _Daily Independent_ were awkwardly
+situated. Their sympathies were entirely with Mr. O’Rourke, and
+they were exceedingly angry with Miss Goold for interfering with the
+collection of funds for the Parliamentary party. At the same time,
+they felt a difficulty in denouncing her, not for want of suitable
+language--the Irish Nationalist press has a superb command of words
+which a self-respecting dictionary would hesitate to recognise--but
+because they felt that push of the horns of the dilemma on which
+O’Rourke had been impaled, and they were obliged to sand their
+denunciations between layers of stoutest pro-Boer sentiment.
+
+All four papers contained reports of the proceedings which were
+practically identical up to a certain point. It was about the
+commencement of the actual bloodshed that they differed. The _Irish
+Times_ reporter believed that Mr. Shea had begun the fray by striking
+Augusta Goold behind the ear with his clenched fist. The _Daily Express_
+man claimed to have overheard Mr. O’Rourke urging his friends to brain
+a member of the audience with a chair. The _Freeman’s Journal_ held that
+Augusta Goold’s supporters had come into the hall supplied with huge
+stones, which, at a given signal, they had flung at the inoffensive
+members of Parliament who occupied the platform, adding, as a
+corroborative detail, that the lady who accompanied Augusta Goold
+had twice kicked the prostrate Mr. Shea in the stomach. The _Daily
+Independent_ advanced the ingenious theory that the contest had been
+precipitated by a malevolent student of Trinity College, who had flung
+an apple of discord--on this occasion a jagged paving-stone of unusual
+size--into the midst of a group of ladies and gentlemen who were
+peacefully discussing a slight difference of opinion among themselves.
+Beyond this point none of the papers gave any account of the
+proceedings, all four reporters having recognised that, not being
+retained as war correspondents, they were not called upon to risk their
+lives on the battlefield. The accounts all closed with the information
+that the wounded had been carried to Jervis Street Hospital, and were
+under treatment suitable to their injuries. Hyacinth had suffered a
+slight concussion of the brain and a flesh wound. Other sufferers were
+in the same ward, Mr. Shea himself occupying a bed, so that Hyacinth had
+the satisfaction of seeing him stretched out, a melancholy figure,
+with a bandage concealing most of his red hair. After the surgeon
+had finished his rounds for the morning a police official visited the
+sufferers, and made a careful note of their names and addresses. He
+inquired in a perfunctory manner whether any of them wished to swear an
+information. No one, except Mr. Shea, was sufficiently satisfied with
+his own share of the meeting to wish for more fame than was unavoidable.
+As no further use was ever made of Mr. Shea’s narrative, it may be
+presumed that the authorities regarded it as wanting in accuracy.
+No blame, however, ought to be attached to the author for any petty
+deviation from the truth of which he may have been guilty. No man’s mind
+is perfectly clear on the morning after he has been struck on the head
+with a stone, and perhaps afterwards kicked twice in the stomach by a
+lady journalist. Besides, all members of Parliament are, in virtue of
+their office, ‘honourable gentlemen.’
+
+An excited and sympathetic nurse provided Hyacinth with copies of the
+four morning papers, which he read with interest and a good deal of
+amusement. Only the account in the _Daily Independent_ caused him any
+uneasiness. No doubt, as he fully recognised, the suggestion about
+the Trinity student was nothing but a wild guess on the part of the
+reporter. It was highly unlikely that anyone would seriously consider a
+theory so intrinsically improbable. Still, if the faintest suspicion of
+the part he had played reached the ears of the college authorities, he
+felt that his career as a divinity student was likely to be an extremely
+brief one. His chief fear was that a prolonged absence from college
+would give rise to inquiry, and that his bandages would excite suspicion
+when he reappeared. Fortunately, the house surgeon decided that he was
+sufficiently recovered to be allowed to leave the hospital early in the
+afternoon. The boot which had put an end to his share in the riot had
+raised its bruise under his hair, so he was able to remove the bandages
+from his head as soon as he got into the street. There still remained a
+long strip of plaster meant to keep a dressing of iodoform in its place
+over the cut on his cheek which Mr. Shea’s chair-leg had inflicted.
+This he could not get off, and thinking it wiser to make his entry into
+college after nightfall, he sought a refuge in Mary O’Dwyer’s rooms.
+
+He found the poetess laid on a sofa and clad in a blue dressing-gown.
+She stretched a hand of welcome to Hyacinth, and then, before he had
+time to take it, began to laugh immoderately. The laughing fit ended in
+sobs, and then tears flowed from her eyes, which she mopped convulsively
+with an already damp pocket-handkerchief. Before she had recovered
+sufficient self-possession to speak, she signed to Hyacinth to fetch a
+bottle of smelling-salts from the chimney-piece. He hastened to obey,
+and found himself kneeling beside the sofa, holding the bottle to her
+nose. After a while she recovered sufficiently to tell him that she had
+not slept at all during the night, and felt extremely unwell and quite
+unstrung in consequence. Another fit of immoderate and tearful laughter
+followed, and Hyacinth, embarrassed and alarmed, fetched a tumbler of
+soda-water from the syphon on the sideboard. The lady refused to
+swallow any, and, just as he had made up his mind to risk an external
+application, recovered again. During the lucid interval which followed
+she informed him that his own conduct had been superb and heroic. What
+seemed to be an effort to celebrate his achievements in extemporary
+verse brought on another fit. Hyacinth determined to risk an appearance
+in the college square in broad daylight rather than continue his
+ministrations. While he was searching for his hat Miss O’Dwyer became
+suddenly quite calm, and began to explain to him how immensely the cause
+of Ireland’s independence had benefited by the demonstration in the
+Rotunda. Hyacinth listened anxiously, waiting for the next explosion,
+and experienced very great relief when the door opened and Augusta Goold
+walked in.
+
+Unlike Mary O’Dwyer, she was entirely mistress of herself. Her cheeks
+were not a shade paler than usual, nor her hand at all less cool and
+firm. She stretched herself, after her usual fashion, in the largest
+available chair and lit a cigarette.
+
+‘You look excited, my dear Mary,’ she said--‘a little overexcited,
+perhaps. Have you had tea? No? Perhaps you will be so kind as to ring
+the bell, Mr. Conneally.’
+
+Mary O’Dwyer repeated the information she had given Hyacinth about her
+sleepless night, and complimented Augusta Goold on her nerve.
+
+‘As for poor little me,’ she went on, ‘I’m like a--like a--you remember
+the kind of thing, don’t you?--like a--I’m not sure if I know the name
+of the thing myself.’
+
+She relapsed into a weak giggle, and Hyacinth stooped for the bottle of
+smelling-salts, which had rolled under the sofa. Augusta Goold was much
+less sympathetic. She fixed her with a strong stare of amazement and
+disgust. Apparently this treatment was the right one, for the giggling
+stopped almost immediately.
+
+‘I see you have got some sticking-plaster on your face, Mr. Conneally,’
+she said, when Mary O’Dwyer had quieted down.
+
+‘Yes,’ said Hyacinth, ‘and a good-sized bump behind my ear.’
+
+‘I suppose this business will be very awkward for you in college. Will
+they turn you out?’
+
+‘I’m sure they will if they find out that I threw that stone at Shea.’
+
+‘You made a very good shot,’ said Augusta, smiling at the recollection.
+‘But how on earth did you come to have a stone that size in the hall
+with you?’
+
+Hyacinth told the story of the man who had been felled by the chair and
+his murderous bequest.
+
+‘That’s the proper spirit,’ said Augusta. ‘I admire that man, and he
+couldn’t have passed his stone on to better hands than yours. Shea went
+down as if he had been shot. I was afraid of my life he would clutch at
+my skirts as he fell or squirm up against me after he was down. But he
+lay quite still. By the way, Mary, I suppose your dress was ruined?’
+
+Mary O’Dwyer was quite subdued.
+
+‘It was torn,’ she said meekly enough.
+
+‘Have you another one?’
+
+‘Of course I have. I’ve three others, besides some old ones.’
+
+‘Well, then, you’d better go and put on one of them. An old one will do.
+It’s disgusting to see a woman slopping about in a dressing-gown at this
+time of day. I’ll have tea ready when you come back.’
+
+Miss O’Dwyer obeyed sulkily. She wished very much that Augusta Goold had
+stopped at home. It would have been a great deal pleasanter to have gone
+on practising hysterics with Hyacinth as a sympathetic spectator. When
+the door was shut Augusta Goold turned to Hyacinth again.
+
+‘That’s the worst of women’--apparently she did not consider herself as
+one of the sex--‘they are all right at the time (nothing could have
+been better than Mary’s behaviour at the meeting), but they collapse
+afterwards in such idiotic ways. But I want to talk to you about
+yourself. I owe you a good turn for what you did last night. Only for
+you, I think Shea would have dared to touch me, and then very likely I
+should have killed him, and there might have been trouble afterwards.’
+She spoke quite calmly, but Hyacinth had very little doubt that she
+meant exactly what she said. ‘Grealy of course, was useless. One might
+have expected him to give utterance to an ancient tribal war-cry, but he
+didn’t even do that. Tim Halloran got frightened when the row began. I
+noticed him dodging about behind Mary and me, and I mean to let him know
+what I think about him. It’s you I have to thank, and I won’t forget it.
+If you get into trouble over this business in college, come to me, and
+I will see you straight. In fact, if you like to give up the divinity
+student business at once, I dare say I can put you in the way of earning
+an honester livelihood.’
+
+Hyacinth was gratified at the way Augusta Goold spoke to him. Since
+the evening on which he had given his opinion about the morality of
+desertion and murder he had been conscious of a coolness in her manner.
+Now he had apparently reinstated himself in her good graces. Praise,
+even for an act he was secretly ashamed of, and gratitude, though he
+by no means recognised that he deserved it, were pleasant to him. He
+promised to remember the offer of help, but declined for the present to
+commit his future to the keeping of so bloodthirsty a patroness.
+
+Curiously enough, Hyacinth’s reception in college was a great deal more
+cordial after the Rotunda meeting than it had ever been before. For a
+while the battle which had been fought at their doors superseded the
+remoter South African warfare as a topic of conversation among the
+students. Their sympathies were with Augusta Goold. Even members of the
+divinity classes suffered themselves to be lured from their habitual
+worship of respectability so far as to express admiration for the
+dramatic picturesqueness of the part she played. It is true that the
+lady herself was called by names universally resented by women, and that
+the broadest slanders were circulated about her character. Still, a halo
+of glory hung round her. It was felt that she had done a surprisingly
+courageous thing when she faced Mr. O’Rourke on his own platform. Also,
+she had behaved with a certain dignity, neither throwing chairs nor
+stones at her opponents. Then, she was an undeniably beautiful woman,
+a fact which made its inevitable appeal to the young men. The mere
+expression of sympathy with this flamboyant and scandal-smeared heroine
+brought with it a delightful flavour of gay and worldly vice. It was
+pretty well known that Hyacinth was a friend of Miss Goold’s, and it
+was rumoured that he had earned his piece of sticking-plaster in
+her defence. No one knew exactly what he had done or how much he had
+suffered, but a great many men were anxious to know. Very much to his
+own surprise, he received a number of visitors in his rooms. Men who had
+been the foremost of his tormentors came, ostensibly to inquire for his
+health, in reality to glean details of the fight at the Rotunda. Certain
+medical students of the kind which glory in any kind of row openly
+congratulated him on his luck in being present on such an occasion. Men
+who claimed to be fast, and tried to impress their acquaintances with
+the belief that they indulged habitually in wild scenes of revelry,
+courted Hyacinth, and boasted afterwards of their second-hand
+acquaintance with Miss Goold. It became the fashion to be seen
+arm-in-arm with him in the quadrangle, and to inquire from him in public
+for ‘Finola.’
+
+This new popularity by no means pleased Hyacinth. He was not at all
+proud of his share in the Rotunda meeting, and lived in daily dread of
+being recognised as the assailant of Mr. Shea. He knew, too, that he was
+making no way with the better class of students. The men whose faces
+he liked were more than ever shy of making his acquaintance. The
+sub-lecturers and minor professors in the divinity school were coldly
+contemptuous in their manner, and it seemed to him that even Dr.
+Henry was less friendly. He became desperately anxious to get out of a
+position which he found more intolerable than the original isolation. He
+applied himself with extreme diligence to his studies, even affecting
+an interest, unnatural for the most pious, in the expositions given
+by learned doctors of the Thirty-nine Articles. At lectures on Church
+history he made notes about the vagaries of heretics so assiduously that
+the professor began to hope that there existed one student at least
+who took an interest in the Christological controversies of the sixth
+century. He never ventured back again to the Wednesday prayer-meeting,
+but he performed many attendances beyond the required minimum at the
+college chapel. Morning after morning he dragged himself from his
+bed and hurried across the dusky quadrangle to take his part in the
+mutilated matins with which the college authorities see fit to usher
+in the day. He even went to hear the sermons delivered on Friday
+afternoons, homilies so painful that the preachers themselves recognise
+an extraordinary merit in enduring them, and allow that submission of
+the ears to one of them is to be reckoned as equal to two ordinary acts
+of devotion.
+
+It is to be hoped that Hyacinth derived some remote benefit from the
+discipline to which he subjected himself, for the immediate results were
+not satisfactory. He seemed no nearer winning the respect of the more
+serious students, and Dr. Henry’s manner showed no signs of softening
+into friendliness. His surfeit of theology bred in him a dislike of the
+subject. The solemn platitudes which were posed as expositions of the
+creeds affected his mind much as the expurgated life histories of maiden
+aunts do the newly-emancipated school-girl. The relentless closing in of
+argument upon a single previously settled doctrine woke in him a desire
+to break through at some point and breathe again in the open. He
+began to fear that he was becoming hopelessly irreligious. His morning
+devotions in the foggy atmosphere of the chapel did not touch the
+capacity for enthusiasm within him. The vague splendour of his father’s
+meditations had left him outside, indeed, but sure that within there
+lay a great reality. But now religion had come to seem an altogether
+narrower thing, a fenced off, well-ordered garden in which useful
+vegetables might be cultivated, but very little inspiring to the soul.
+
+The unwelcome attention of the students whose friendship he did not
+desire, and his increasing dislike for the work he was expected to do,
+led him to spend more and more of his time with Augusta Goold and her
+friends. He found in their society that note of enthusiasm which he
+missed in the religion of the college. He responded warmly to their
+passionate devotion to the dream of an independent Irish Republic. He
+felt less conscious of his want of religion in their company. With the
+exception of Augusta Goold herself, the members of the coterie were
+professedly Roman Catholics; but this made little or no difference
+in their intercourse with him. What he found in their ideals was a
+substitute for religion, a space where his enthusiasm might extend
+itself. He became, as he realized his own position clearly, very
+doubtful whether he ought to continue his college course. It did not
+seem likely that he would in the end be able to take Holy Orders, and
+to remain in the divinity school without that intention was clearly
+foolish. On the other hand, he shrank from inflicting what he knew would
+be a painful disappointment on his father. It happened that before the
+term ended his connection with the divinity school was cut in a way that
+saved him from the responsibility of forming a decision.
+
+He was a regular attendant at the lectures of Dr. Spenser, who had never
+from the first disguised his dislike and contempt for Hyacinth. This
+gentleman was one day explaining to his class the difference between
+evidence which leads to a high degree of probability and a demonstration
+which produces absolute certainty. The subject was a dry one, and quite
+unsuited to Dr. Spenser, whose heart was set on maintaining a reputation
+for caustic wit. He cast about for an illustration which would at once
+make clear the distinction and enliven his lecture. His eye lit upon
+Hyacinth, upon whose cheek there still burned a long red scar. Dr.
+Spenser’s face brightened.
+
+‘For instance, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘if I should reason from the fact
+that our friend Mr. Conneally affects the society of certain charming
+ladies of doubtful reputation, like Miss Goold, to the conclusion that
+Mr. Conneally is himself a Nationalist, I should only have arrived at
+a probable conclusion. The degree of probability might be very high;
+still, I should have no right to regard my conclusion as absolutely
+certain.’
+
+The class tittered delightedly. Dr. Spenser proceeded without heeding a
+deep flush on Hyacinth’s face, which might have warned a wiser man that
+an explosion was coming.
+
+‘If I should then proceed to reason thus: All Nationalists are rebels
+and potential murderers--Mr. Conneally is a Nationalist; therefore Mr.
+Conneally is a rebel and potential murderer--I should, assuming the
+truth of my minor premise, have arrived at a certainty.’
+
+The syllogism was greeted with loud applause. Hyacinth started to his
+feet. For a time he could only gasp for breath to utter a reply, and
+Dr. Spenser, secure in the conviction of his own intellectual and social
+superiority to the son of a parson from Connemara, determined to pursue
+his prey.
+
+‘Does Mr. Conneally,’ he asked with a simper, ‘propose to impugn the
+accuracy of my induction or the logic of my deduction?’
+
+The simper and the number of beautiful long words which Dr. Spenser had
+succeeded in collecting together into one sentence provoked a sustained
+clapping of hands and stamping of feet from the class. Hyacinth rapidly
+regained his self-possession, and was surprised at his own coolness when
+he replied:
+
+‘I should say, sir, that a man who makes an induction holding up a lady
+to ridicule is probably a cad, and that the cad who makes a deduction
+confusing patriotism with murder is certainly a fool.’
+
+A report of Hyacinth’s speech was handed to Dr. Henry, with a
+suggestion that expulsion from the divinity school was the only suitable
+punishment. Hyacinth did not look forward with any pleasure to the
+interview to which he was summoned. He was agreeably surprised when he
+entered the professor’s room. Dr. Henry offered him a chair.
+
+‘I hear,’ he said--his tone was severe, but a barely perceptible gleam
+of humorous appreciation flashed across his eyes as he spoke--‘that you
+have been exceedingly insolent to Dr. Spenser.’
+
+‘I don’t know, sir, whether you heard the whole story, but if you did
+you will surely recognise that Dr. Spenser was gratuitously insulting to
+me.’
+
+‘Quite so,’ said Dr. Henry. ‘I recognise that, but the question is, What
+am I to do with you now? What would you do if you were in my place? I
+should like to know your views of the best way out of the situation.’
+
+Hyacinth was silent.
+
+‘You see,’ Dr. Henry went on, ‘we can’t have our divinity lecturers
+called fools and cads before their classes. I should be afraid myself
+to deliver a lecture in your presence if I thought I was liable to that
+kind of interruption.’
+
+‘I think, sir,’ said Hyacinth, ‘that the best thing will be for me to
+leave the divinity school.’
+
+‘I think so, too. But leaving our divinity school need not mean that you
+give up the idea of taking Holy Orders. I have a very high opinion of
+your abilities, Conneally--so high that I should not like the Church to
+lose your services. At the same time, you are not at present the kind
+of man whom I could possibly recommend to any Irish Bishop. Your
+Nationalist principles are an absolute bar to your working in the Church
+of Ireland.’
+
+‘I wonder, sir, how you can call our Church the Church of Ireland, and
+in the same breath say that there is no room for a Nationalist in her.
+Don’t the two things contradict each other.’
+
+Dr. Henry’s eyes twinkled again. There spread over his mouth a smile of
+tolerant amusement.
+
+‘My dear boy, I’m not going to let you trap me into a discussion of that
+question. Theoretically, I have no doubt you would make out an excellent
+case. National Church, National spirit, National politics--Irish Church,
+Irish nation, Irish ideas. They all go excellently together, don’t they?
+And yet the facts are as I state them. A Nationalist clergyman in
+the Church of Ireland would be just as impossible as an English
+Nonconformist in the Court of Louis Quatorze. After all, in this life
+one has got to steer one’s course among facts, and they’re sharp things
+which knock holes in the man who disregards them. Now, what I propose
+to you is this: Put off your ordination for three years or so. Take
+up schoolmastaring. I will undertake to get you a post in an English
+school. Your politics won’t matter over there, because no one will in
+the least understand what you mean. Work hard, think hard, read hard.
+Mix with the bigger world across the Channel. See England and realize
+what England is and what her Empire means. Don’t be angry with me for
+saying that, long before the three years are over, you’ll have come to
+see that what you call patriotism is nothing else than parochialism of
+a particularly narrow and uninstructed kind. Then come back here to me,
+and I’ll arrange for your ordination. You’ll do the best of good work
+when you’ve grown up a bit, and I’ll see you a Bishop before I die.’
+
+‘I shall always be grateful to you,’ said Hyacinth. ‘I shall never
+forget your kindness, and the way you’ve treated me; but I can’t do what
+you ask.’
+
+‘Oh, I’m not going to take no for an answer,’ said Dr. Henry. ‘Go home
+to the West and think it over. Talk to your father about your future.
+Write to me if you like about your plans, and remember my offer is open
+six months or a year hence. You’ll be the same man then that you are
+now--I mean, in character. I’m not afraid of your turning out badly. You
+may think wrong-headedly, but I’m sure you’ll not act disgracefully.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+The December afternoon was growing dark when the weary car-horse
+surmounted the last hill on the road from Clifden and broke into a
+shambling trot down the long straight stretch into Carrowkeel. Soon, as
+the distance dwindled, the lights which twinkled here and there in the
+village became distinguishable. This--Hyacinth recognised it--was the
+great hanging lamp in the window of Rafferty’s shop. That, a softer
+glow, came from the forge of Killeen, the smith. That, and that, fainter
+and more uncertain lights, were from fires seen through the open upper
+section of cottage doors. He could almost tell whose the cabins were
+where they shone. The scene inside rose to the imagination. A man with
+ragged clothes and a half-empty pipe is squeezed into the stone nook
+beside the blazing turf. The kettle, hanging from its hook, swings
+steaming beside him. The woman of the house, barefooted, sluttish, in
+torn crimson petticoat and gray bodice pinned across her breast, moves
+the red cinders from the lid of the pot-oven and peers at the browning
+cake within. Babies toddle or crawl over the greasy floor. The car
+rattled into the village street. Men whom he knew stopped it to speak to
+him. Children playing the last of their games in the fading light paused
+to stare at him. Father Moran, returning to his presbytery, waved his
+hand and shouted a greeting. He passed the last house of the village,
+and could see the fishing-boats, dim and naked-looking, riding at their
+anchors in the bay. Out beyond them, grim and terrible in the twilight,
+lay the hulk where the ice for fish-packing was stored. The thick stump
+of her one remaining mast made a blacker bar against the black sky. The
+pier was deserted, but he could see the bulky stacks of fish-boxes piled
+on it, and hear the water lapping against it. Along its utmost edge lay
+a belt of gray white, where the waves broke as they surged round it. He
+passed the pier, and there lay before him the long hill that led home.
+The church and the ruined school stood out clearly on the skyline. Below
+them, less clearly seen, was the rectory, and Hyacinth noted that the
+lamp in the kitchen was lit. Then the door was opened, and he saw, plain
+against the light, a man’s figure, his father’s. No doubt the old man
+was watching and listening. Perhaps the sound of the wheels reached him
+through the evening air, for in a few minutes he came out and walked
+down the drive. Hyacinth saw him fumble with the fastening of the
+rickety gate, and at last open it slowly and with difficulty. The car
+reached a gap in the loose stone wall, a familiar gap, for across it lay
+a short cut up a steeper part of the hill, which the road went round.
+Hyacinth jumped down and ran up the path. In another minute the
+greeting of father and son was accomplished, and the two were walking
+hand-in-hand towards the house. Hyacinth noticed that his father
+trembled, and that his feet stumbled uncertainly among the loose stones
+and stiff weeds.
+
+When they entered the lighted room he saw that his father seemed
+older--many years older--than when he had said good-bye to him two
+months before. His skin was very transparent, his lips were tremulous,
+his eyes, after the first long look at his son, shifted feebly to the
+fire, the table, and the floor.
+
+‘My dear son,’ he said, ‘I thank God that I have got you safe home
+again. Indeed, it is good to see you again, Hyacinth, for it has been
+very lonely while you were away. I have not been able to do very much
+lately or to go out to the seashore, as I used to. Perhaps it is only
+that I have not cared to. But I have tried hard to get everything ready
+for your coming.’
+
+He looked round the room with evident pride as he spoke. Hyacinth
+followed his gaze, and it was with a sense of deep shame that he found
+himself noticing the squalor of his home. The table was stained, and the
+books which littered half of it were thick with dust and grease-spotted.
+The earthen floor was damp and pitted here and there, so that the chairs
+stood perilously among its inequalities. The fine white powder of turf
+ashes lay thick upon the dresser. The whitewash above the fireplace was
+blackened by the track of the smoke that had blown out of the chimney
+and climbed up to the still blacker rafters of the roof. Hyacinth
+remembered how he, and not his father, had been accustomed to clean the
+room and wash the cups and plates. He wondered how such matters had been
+managed in his absence, and a great sense of compassion filled his eyes
+with tears as he thought of the painful struggle which the details
+of life must have brought upon his father. He noted the evident
+preparations for his coming. There were two eggs lying in a saucer ready
+to be boiled, a fresh loaf--and this was not the day they got their
+bread--and a small tin of cocoa beside his cup. The hearth was piled
+with glowing turf, and the iron tripod with a saucepan on it stood
+surrounded with red coals. Some sense of what Hyacinth was feeling
+passed into his father’s mind.
+
+‘Isn’t it all right, my son? I tried to make it very nice for you. I
+wanted to get Maggie Cassidy up from the village for the day, but her
+baby had the chin-cough, and she couldn’t come.’
+
+He took Hyacinth’s hand and held it while he spoke.
+
+‘Perhaps it looks poor to you,’ he went on, ‘after your college rooms
+and the houses your friends live in; but it’s your own home, son, isn’t
+it?’
+
+Hyacinth made a gulp at the emotion which had brought him near to tears.
+
+‘It’s splendid, father--simply splendid. And now I’m going to boil those
+two eggs and make the cocoa, and we’ll have a feast. Hallo! you’ve got
+some jam--jam and butter and eggs, and this is the month of December,
+when there’s hardly a hen laying or a cow milking in the whole parish!’
+
+He held up the jam-pot as he spoke. It was wrapped in dingy red paper,
+and had a mouldy damp stain on one side. Hyacinth recognised the mark,
+and remembered that he had seen the identical pot on the upper shelf of
+Rafferty’s shop for years. Its label bore an inscription only vaguely
+prophetic of the contents--‘Irish Household Jam.’
+
+‘That’s right, father, you are supporting home manufacture. I declare
+I wouldn’t have tasted it if it had come from England. You see, I’m a
+greater patriot than ever.’
+
+Old Mr. Conneally smiled in a feeble, wavering way. He seemed scarcely
+to understand what was being said to him, but he found a quiet pleasure
+in the sound of his son’s voice. He settled himself in a chair by the
+fireside and watched contentedly while Hyacinth put the eggs into the
+saucepan, hung the kettle on its hook, and cut slices of bread. Then the
+meal was eaten, Hyacinth after his long drive finding a relish even in
+the household jam. He plied his father with questions, and heard what
+the old man knew of the gossip of the village--how Thady Durkan had
+broken his arm, and talked of giving up the fishing; how the police from
+Letter-frack had found, or said they found, a whisky-still behind the
+old castle; how a Gaelic League organizer had come round persuading the
+people to sing and dance at the Galway Féis.
+
+After supper Hyacinth nerved himself to tell the story of his term in
+college, and his determination to leave the divinity school. More than
+once he made an effort to begin, but the old man, who brightened a
+little during their meal, relapsed again into dreaminess, and did not
+seem to be listening to him. They pulled their chairs near to the fire,
+and Mr. Conneally sat holding his son’s hand fast. Sometimes he stroked
+or patted it gently, but otherwise he seemed scarcely to recognise
+that he was not alone. His eyes were fixed on the fire, but they stared
+strangely, as if they saw something afar off, something not in the
+room at all. There was no response in them when Hyacinth spoke, and no
+intelligence. From time to time his lips moved slightly as if they were
+forming words, but he said nothing. After awhile Hyacinth gave up the
+attempt to tell his story, and sat silent for so long that in the end he
+was startled when his father spoke.
+
+‘Hyacinth, my son, I have somewhat to say unto you.’ Before Hyacinth
+could reply to him he continued: ‘And the young man answered and said
+unto him, “Say on.” And the old man lifted up his voice and said unto
+his son, “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”’
+
+He spoke as if he were reading out of a book some narrative from the
+Bible. Hyacinth realized suddenly that the communication which was to
+be made to him had been rehearsed by his father alone, again and again,
+that statement, question and reply, would follow each other in
+due sequence from the same lips. He felt that his father was still
+rehearsing, and had forgotten the real presence of his son. He grasped
+the hand that held him and shook it, saying sharply:
+
+‘Father, father, I am here. Don’t you know me?’
+
+‘Yes, yes, my son. Surely I know you. There is something I want to tell
+you. I have wanted to tell it to you for many days. I am glad that you
+are here now to listen to it.’
+
+He paused, and Hyacinth feared that he would relapse again into dreamy
+insensibility; but he did not.
+
+‘I think,’ he said, ‘that I should like to pray before I speak to you.’
+
+He knelt down as Hyacinth had seen him kneel a thousand times before,
+facing the eastward-looking window, now a black, uncurtained square in
+the whitewashed wall. What he said was almost unintelligible. There was
+no petition nor even any sequence of ideas which could be traced.
+He poured forth a series of ejaculations expressive of intense and
+rapturous delight, very strange to listen to in such a place and from
+an old man’s lips. Then the language he spoke changed from English
+into Gaelic, and there came a kind of hymn of adoration. His sentences
+followed each other in metrical balance like the Latin of the old
+liturgies, and suited themselves naturally to a subdued melody, half
+chant, half cry, like the mourning of the keeners round a grave. At
+last, rising from his knees, he spoke, and his voice became wholly
+unemotional, devoid of fervour or excitement. He told his story as a man
+might relate some quite commonplace incident of daily life.
+
+‘One evening I was sitting here by the fire, just as I always sit. I
+remember that the lamp was not lit, and that the fire was low, so that
+there was not much light in the room. It came into my mind that it was
+just out of such gloom that the Lord called “Samuel, Samuel,” and I
+wished that I was like Samuel, so innocent that I could hear the voice
+of the Lord. I do not remember what I thought of after that. Perhaps for
+a time I did not think at all. Then I felt that there were arms about my
+neck; but not like your arms, Hyacinth, when you were a child and clung
+to me. These were arms which held me lovingly, strongly, protectingly,
+like--do you remember, Hyacinth?--“His right hand is under my head; His
+left hand doth embrace me.” I sat quite still, and did not move or speak
+or even breathe, lest He should go away from me. Then, after a long
+time--I knew afterwards that the time was long, though then it seemed
+only a minute for the joy that I had in it--He told me--I do not mean
+that I heard a voice or any words; I did not hear, I _felt_ Him tell
+me--the things that are to be. The last great fight, the Armageddon,
+draweth very near. All that is good is on one side in the fight, and the
+Captain over all. What is bad is on the other side--all kinds of tyranny
+and greed and lust. I did not hear these words, but I felt the things,
+only without any fear, for round me were the everlasting arms. And
+the battlefield is Ireland, our dear Ireland which we love. All these
+centuries since the great saints died He has kept Ireland to be His
+battlefield. I understood then how our people have been saved from
+riches and from power and from the opportunities of lust, that our soil
+out of all the world might be fit for the feet of the great Captain, for
+the marching of His horsemen and His chariots. Not even when I knew all
+this did I desire to share in the conflict. I am old and feeble, but
+that is not the reason why there was no desire on me, for strength is in
+His power to give to whom He wills. I did not desire it, because I was
+quite happy, being safe with Him.’
+
+For a long time after he ceased speaking there was silence, for Hyacinth
+had no comment to offer. At last the old man spoke again.
+
+‘That is all. I have no other word of revelation. But I have wondered
+since how men are to be disentangled from their parties and their
+churches and their nations, and gathered simply into good and bad. Will
+all men who are good just know the Captain when they see Him and range
+themselves with Him? But why should we think about such things as these?
+Doubtless He can order them. But you, Hyacinth--will you be sure to know
+the good side from the bad, the Captain from the enemy?’
+
+For a long time after he had gone to bed Hyacinth lay awake haunted by
+his father’s prophecy of an Armageddon. There was that in his nature
+which responded eagerly to such a call to battle. In the presence of
+enthusiasm like his father’s or like Augusta Goold’s, Hyacinth
+caught fire. His mind flamed with the idea of an Independent Ireland
+resplendent with her ancient glories. He embraced no less eagerly the
+thought of his father’s battle and his own part in it. Groping for
+points of contact between the two enthusiasms, he caught at the
+conception of the Roman Church as the Antichrist and her power in
+Ireland as the point round which the fight must rage. Then with a sudden
+flash he saw, not Rome, but the British Empire, as the embodiment of
+the power of darkness. He had learned to think of it as a force, greedy,
+materialistic, tyrannous, grossly hypocritical. What more was required
+to satisfy the conception of evil that he sought for? He remembered
+all that he had ever heard from Augusta Goold and her friends about the
+shameless trickery of English statesmen, about the insatiable greed of
+the merchants, about the degraded sensuality of the workers. He recalled
+the blatant boastfulness with which English demagogues claimed to be
+the sole possessors of enlightened consciences, and the tales of
+native races exploited, gin-poisoned, and annihilated by pioneers of
+civilization advancing with Bibles in their hands.
+
+But with all his capacity for enthusiasm there was a strain of weakness
+in Hyacinth. More than once after the glories of an Independent Ireland
+had been preached to him he had found himself growing suddenly cold and
+dejected, smitten by an east wind of common-sense. At the time when he
+first recognised the loftiness of his father’s religion he had revolted
+against being called upon to adopt so fantastic a creed. So now, when
+his mind grew weary with the endeavour to set an Armageddon in array, he
+began to wish for a life of peaceful monotony, a place to be quiet in,
+where no high calls or imperious demands would come to threaten him.
+He ceased to toss to and fro, and gradually sank into a half-conscious
+sleep. It seemed to him at the time that he was still awake, held back
+from slumber by the great stillness of the country, that silence which
+disturbs ears long accustomed to the continuous roar of towns. Suddenly
+he started into perfect wakefulness, and felt that he was in possession
+of all his faculties. The room where he lay was quite dark, but he
+strained his eyes to see something in it. He listened intently, although
+no sound whatever met his ears. A great overmastering fear laid hold on
+him. He tried to reason with himself, insisting that there was nothing,
+and could be nothing, to be afraid of. Still the fear remained. His
+lips grew stiff and painfully hot, and when he tried to moisten them his
+tongue was dry and moved across them raspingly. He struggled with the
+terror that paralyzed him, and by a great effort raised his hand to his
+forehead. It was damp and cold, and the hair above it was damp. He had
+no way of knowing how much of the night had passed, or even how long he
+lay rigid, unable to breathe without a kind of pain; but suddenly as it
+had come the terror left him, left him without any effort on his part or
+any reason that he recognised. Then the window of his room shook, and he
+heard outside the low moan of the rising wind. Some heavy drops of rain
+struck audibly on the roof, and the first gust of the storm carried to
+his ears the sound of waves beating on the rocks. His senses strained no
+more. His eyes closed, and he sank quietly into a long dreamless sleep.
+
+It was late when he woke, so late that the winter sky was fully lit. The
+wind, whose first gusts had lulled him to sleep, had risen to a gale,
+and the rain, mixed with salt spray, beat fiercely against his window
+and on the roof. He listened, expecting to hear his father moving in the
+room below, but within the house there was no sound. He rose, vaguely
+anxious, and without waiting to dress went into the kitchen. Everything
+lay untouched, just as he had left it the night before. The lamp and
+the remnants of the meal were on the table. The two chairs stood side
+by side before the hearth, where the fire which he had covered up
+smouldered feebly. He turned and went to his father’s room. He could
+not have explained how it was, but when he opened the door he was not
+surprised to see the old man lying quite still, dead, upon the bed. His
+face was turned upwards, and on it was that strange look of emotionless
+peace which rests very often on the faces of the dead. It seemed
+to Hyacinth quite natural that the soul as it departed into unknown
+beatitude should have printed this for the last expression on the
+earthly habitation which it left behind. He neither wondered nor, at
+first, sorrowed very much to see his father dead. His sight was undimmed
+and his hands steady when he closed the eyes and composed the limbs of
+the body on the bed. Afterwards it seemed strange to him that he should
+have dressed quietly, arranged the furniture in the kitchen, and blown
+the fire into a blaze before he went down into the village to tell his
+news and seek for help.
+
+They buried Æneas Conneally beside his wife in the wind-swept
+churchyard. The fishermen carried his coffin into the church and out
+again to the grave. Father Moran himself stood by bareheaded while the
+clergyman from Clifden read the prayers and sprinkled the coffin-lid
+with the clay which symbolized the return of earth to earth and dust to
+dust. In the presence of death, and, with the recollection of the simple
+goodness of the man who was gone, priest and people alike forgot for an
+hour the endless strife between his creed and theirs.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+In Connaught the upper middle classes, clergy, doctors, lawyers, police
+officers, bank officials, and so forth, are all strangers in the land.
+Each of them looks forward to a promotion which will enable him to move
+to some more congenial part of Ireland. A Dublin suburb is the ideal
+residence; failing that, the next best thing is a country town within
+easy reach of the metropolis. Most of them sooner or later achieve a
+promotion, but some of them are so unfortunate as to die in their exile.
+In either case their furniture and effects are auctioned. No one ever
+removes his goods from Connaught, because the cost of getting things
+to any other part of Ireland is exorbitant, and also because tables
+and chairs fetch very high prices at auctions. Thus it happens that a
+certain historic interest attaches to the furniture of most middle-class
+houses west of the Shannon. The dispensary doctor dines off a table
+which once graced the parlour of a parish priest. The inspector
+of police boasts of the price he paid for his easy-chair, recently
+upholstered, at the auction of a departing bank manager, the same
+mahogany frame having once supported the portly person of an old-time
+Protestant Archdeacon. It is to be supposed that the furniture
+originally imported--no one knows how--into Connaught must have been of
+superlative quality. Articles whose pedigree, so to speak, can be traced
+for nearly a hundred years are still in daily use, unimpaired by changes
+of scene and ownership.
+
+An auction of any importance is a public holiday. Clergy, doctors,
+lawyers, and police officers gather to the scene, not unlike those
+beasts of prey of whom we read that they readily devour the remains of
+a fallen member of their own pack. The natives also collect
+together--publicans and shopkeepers in search of bargains in china,
+glass, and house-linen; farmers bent on purchasing such outdoor property
+as wheelbarrows, scythes, or harness.
+
+When Hyacinth, to use the local expression, ‘called an auction’ shortly
+after his father’s death, he was favoured with quite the usual crowd of
+would-be buyers. Almost everyone with either money or credit within
+a radius of twenty miles came into Carrowkeel for the occasion. The
+presiding auctioneer had done his duty beforehand by advertising old Mr.
+Conneally’s mouldy furniture as ‘magnificently upholstered’ suites,
+and his battered editions of the classics as ‘a valuable library
+of handsomely bound books.’ It is not likely that anyone was really
+deceived by these announcements, or expected to find in the little
+rectory anything sumptuous or splendid. The people assembled mainly
+because they were exceedingly curious to see the inside of a house whose
+doors had never been open to them during the lifetime of the owner. It
+was always possible, besides, that though the ‘magnificently upholstered
+suites’ existed only in the auctioneer’s imagination, treasures of
+silver spoons or candlesticks plated upon copper might be discovered
+among the effects of a man who lived as queer a life as Mr. Conneally.
+When men and women put themselves to a great deal of inconvenience to
+attend an auction, they do not like to return empty-handed. A day is
+more obviously wasted if one goes home with nothing to show than if one
+brings a table or a bedstead purchased at twice its proper value. Thus
+the bidding at Hyacinth’s auction was brisk, and the prices such as gave
+sincere satisfaction to the auctioneer. Everything was sold except ‘the
+valuable library.’ It was in vain that the auctioneer made personal
+appeals to Father Moran and the Rector of Clifden, as presumably the
+two most learned gentlemen present. Neither of them wanted the venerable
+classics. In fact, neither of them could have read a line of the crooked
+Greek type or construed a page of the Latin authors. Even the Irish
+books, in spite of the Gaelic revival, found no purchasers. When all was
+over, Hyacinth wheeled them away in barrowfuls, wondering greatly what
+he was to do with them.
+
+Indeed, the disposal of his library was not the chief of his
+perplexities. He wondered also what he was to do with himself. When the
+auctioneer sent in his cheque, and the London Committee of the Mission
+had paid over certain arrears of salary, Hyacinth found himself the
+possessor of nearly two hundred pounds. It seemed to him quite a large
+fortune, amply sufficient to start life with, if only some suitable way
+of employing brains, energy, and money would suggest itself. In order to
+consider the important topic at his leisure, he hired the only lodging
+in Carrowkeel--the apartment (it was both bed and sitting room) over Mr.
+Rafferty’s public-house. The furniture had suffered during the tenancy
+of a series of Congested Districts Board officials. An engineer, who
+went to sleep in the evenings over the fire, had burnt a round hole in
+the hearthrug. An instructor in fish-curing, a hilarious young man,
+had cracked the mirror over the mantelpiece, and broken many ornaments,
+including the fellow of the large china dog which now mourned its mate
+on the sideboard. Other gentlemen had been responsible for dislocating
+the legs of two chairs and a disorganization of the handle, which made
+it impossible to shut the door from the inside. The chief glory of the
+apartment, however, still remained--a handsomely-framed document,
+signed by Earl Spencer, then Lord Lieutenant, ordering the arrest of the
+present Mr. Rafferty’s father as a person dangerous to the Commonwealth.
+
+The first thing which brought Hyacinth’s meditations to a definite point
+was a letter he received from Dr. Henry.
+
+‘I do not know,’ the professor wrote, ‘and of course I do not wish
+to inquire, how you are situated financially; but if, as I suppose is
+likely, you are obliged in the near future to earn your living, I may
+perhaps be of some help to you. You have taken your B.A. degree, and are
+so far qualified either to accept a post as a schoolmaster in an English
+preparatory school or to seek ordination from some Bishop. As you are
+probably aware, none of our Irish Bishops will accept a man who has
+not completed his divinity course. Several English Bishops, however,
+especially in the northern province, are willing to ordain men who have
+nothing more than a University degree, always supposing that they pass
+the required examination. I shall be quite willing to give you a letter
+of recommendation to one of these Bishops, and I have no doubt that
+a curacy could be found for you in one of the northern manufacturing
+towns, where you would have an ample sphere for useful work.’
+
+The letter went on to urge the advisability of Hyacinth’s suppressing,
+disguising, or modifying his political opinions, which, stated nakedly,
+were likely to beget a certain prejudice in the well-balanced episcopal
+mind, and in any case would be quite out of place among the operatives
+of Yorkshire or Lancashire.
+
+Hyacinth recognised and appreciated Dr. Henry’s kindness. He even tried
+to bring himself to consider the offer seriously and carefully, but it
+was no use. He could not conceive himself as likely to be either useful
+or happy amid the hustling commercialism of the Manchester streets or
+the staid proprieties of an Anglican vicarage.
+
+After he had spent about a week in his new lodging, Father Moran called
+on him. The priest sat beside the fire for more than an hour chatting
+in a desultory manner. He drank tea and smoked, and it was not until he
+rose to go that the real object of his visit appeared.
+
+‘I don’t know what you’re thinking of doing, Mr. Conneally, and maybe
+I’ve no right to ask.’
+
+‘I wouldn’t have the least objection to telling you,’ said Hyacinth, ‘if
+I knew myself; but I haven’t my mind made up.’
+
+The priest put down his hat again, and settled himself with his back to
+the fire and his hands in his pockets. Hyacinth sat down, and during the
+pause which followed contemplated the wonderful number and variety of
+the stains on the black waistcoat in front of him.
+
+‘Then you’ve given up the idea of finishing your divinity course?’ said
+the priest. ‘I’m not blaming you in the least. There’s men that studying
+suits, and there’s men that it doesn’t. I never was much of a one for
+books myself.’
+
+He sighed heavily, perhaps at the recollection of his own struggles with
+the mysteries of theology in his Maynooth student days. Then he walked
+over and closed the door, returned, drew a chair close to Hyacinth, and
+spoke in the tone of a man who imparts an important secret.
+
+‘Did you hear that Thady Durkan’s giving up the fishing? Since he broke
+his arm he declares he’ll never step aboard the boat again. You know the
+St. Bridget. She’s not one of the biggest boats, but she’s a very lucky
+one. She made over five hundred pounds last year, besides the share the
+Board took. She was built at Baltimore, and the Board spent over two
+hundred pounds on her, nets and gear and all. There’s only one year more
+of instalments to pay off the price of her, and Thady has the rest of
+the men bought out. There’s nobody owns a stick or a net or a sail of
+her except himself, barring, of course, what’s due to the Board.’
+
+Hyacinth was sufficiently acquainted with the system on which the
+Congested Districts Board provides the Connaught fishermen with boats
+and nets to understand Father Moran’s rather involved statement
+of Durkan’s financial position. He did not yet grasp why all this
+information should have been conveyed to him in such a solemn and
+mysterious tone.
+
+‘You might have the _St. Bridget_,’ said the priest, ‘for one hundred
+and fifty pounds down.’
+
+He paused to let the full glory of the situation lay hold upon Hyacinth.
+Perhaps he expected an outburst of delight and surprise, but none came.
+
+‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘there’s others looking for her. The men that
+worked with Thady are thinking of making him an offer, and I dare say
+the Board would be glad enough to have the boat owned among them; but I
+can put in a word myself both with Thady and the inspector. Faith, the
+times is changed since I was a young man. I can remember when a priest
+was no more thought of than a barefooted gossure out of a bog, and now
+there isn’t a spalpeen of a Government inspector but lifts his hat to me
+in the street. Oh, a note from me will go a good way with the Board,
+and you’ll not miss the chance for want of my good word--I promise you
+that.’
+
+‘Thank you,’ said Hyacinth.
+
+‘Mind you, there’s a good thing to be made out of her. But sure you know
+that as well as I do myself, and maybe better. What do you say now?’
+
+‘I’ll think it over,’ said Hyacinth, ‘and whatever comes of it I’ll be
+greatly obliged to you.’
+
+‘Well, don’t be delaying too long. And look you here’--his voice sank
+almost to a whisper--‘don’t be talking about what I’ve said to you.
+People are queer, and if Father Joyce down in Clifden came to hear
+that I was working for a Protestant he’d be sure to go talking to the
+Archbishop, and I’d never get to the end of the fuss that would be
+made.’
+
+‘Indeed, it’s very good of you, especially considering who I am--I mean,
+my father being a convert, and----’
+
+‘Say no more,’ said the priest--‘say no more. Your father was a good
+man, Catholic or Protestant. I’m not one of these bitter kind of
+priests, Mr. Conneally. I can be a good Catholic without hating my
+neighbours. I don’t hold with all this bullyragging in newspapers about
+“sourfaces” and “saved.” Maybe that’s the reason that I’m stuck down
+here at the other end of nowhere all my life, and never got promotion
+or praise. But what do I care as long as they let me alone to do my work
+for the people? I’m not afraid to say it to you, Mr. Conneally, for you
+won’t want to get me into trouble, but it’s my belief that there’s many
+of our priests would rather have grand churches than contented people.
+They’re fonder of Rome than they are of Ireland.’
+
+‘Really, Father Moran,’ said Hyacinth, smiling, ‘if you go on like this,
+I shall expect to hear of your turning Protestant.’
+
+‘God forbid, Mr. Conneally! I wish you well. I wish you to be here among
+us, and to be prosperous; but the dearest wish of my heart for you is
+that I might see you back in the Catholic Church, believing the creed of
+your forefathers.’
+
+The priest’s suggestion attracted Hyacinth a great deal more than Dr.
+Henry’s. He liked the sea and the fishing, and he loved the simple
+people among whom he had been brought up. His experiences in Dublin had
+not encouraged him to be ambitious. Life in the great world--it was thus
+that he thought of the bickerings of the Dublin Nationalists and the
+schoolboy enthusiasms of college students--was not a very simple
+thing. There was a complexity and a confusion in affairs which made
+it difficult to hold to any cause devotedly. It seemed to him, looking
+back, that Miss Goold’s ideals--and she had ideals, as he knew--were
+somehow vulgarized in their contact with the actual. He had seen
+something of the joy she found in her conflict with O’Rourke, and it did
+not seem to him to be pure or ennobling. At one time he was on the verge
+of deciding to do what the priest wished. Walking day by day along the
+shore or through the fields, he came to think that life might very
+well be spent without ambitious or extended hopes in quiet toil and
+unexciting pleasures. What held him back was the recollection, which
+never ceased to haunt him, of his father’s prophecy. The thought of
+the great fight, declared to be imminent, stirred in him an emotion so
+strong that the peace and monotony he half desired became impossible.
+He never made it clear to himself that he either believed or disbelieved
+the prediction. He certainly did not expect to see an actual gathering
+of armed men, or that Ireland was to be the scene of a battle like those
+in South Africa. But there was in him a conviction that Ireland was
+awakening out of a long sleep, was stretching her limbs in preparation
+for activity. He felt the quiver of a national strenuousness which was
+already shaking loose the knots of the old binding-ropes of prejudice
+and cowardice. It seemed to him that bone was coming to dry bone, and
+that sooner or later--very soon, it was likely--one would breathe on
+these, and they would live. That contest should come out of such a
+renaissance was inevitable. But what contest? Against whom was the new
+Ireland to fight, and who was truly on her side? Here was the puzzle,
+insoluble but insistent. It would not let him rest, recurring to his
+mind with each fresh recollection of his father’s prophecy.
+
+It was while he was wearying himself with this perplexity that he got
+a letter from Augusta Goold. It was characteristic of her that she had
+written no word of sympathy when she heard of his father’s death, and
+now, when a letter did come, it contained no allusion to Hyacinth’s
+affairs. She told him with evident delight that she had enlisted no less
+than ten recruits for the Boer army. She had collected sufficient money
+to equip them and pay their travelling expenses. It was arranged that
+they were to proceed to Paris, and there join a body of volunteers
+organized by a French officer, a certain Pierre de Villeneuve, about
+whom Miss Goold was enthusiastic. She was in communication with an
+Irishman who seemed likely to be a suitable captain for her little band,
+and she wanted Hyacinth back in Dublin to help her.
+
+‘You know,’ she wrote, ‘the people I have round me here. Poor old Grealy
+is quite impracticable, though he means well. He talks about nothing
+but the Fianna and Finn McCool, and can’t see that my fellows must have
+riding lessons, and must be got somehow to understand the mechanism of
+a rifle. Tim Halloran has been in a sulk ever since I told him what I
+thought of his conduct at the Rotunda. He never comes near me, and Mary
+O’Dwyer told me the other day that he called my volunteers a “pack of
+blackguards.” I dare say it’s perfectly true, but they’re a finer kind
+of blackguard than the sodden loafers the English recruit for their
+miserable army.’
+
+She went on to describe the series of Boer victories which had come one
+after another just at Christmas-time. She was confident that the cause
+of freedom and nationality would ultimately triumph, and she foresaw the
+intervention of some Continental Power. A great blow would be struck at
+the already tottering British Empire, and then--the freedom of Ireland.
+
+Hyacinth felt strangely excited as he read her news. The letter seemed
+the first clear note of the trumpet summoning him to his father’s
+Armageddon. Politics and squabbling at home might be inglorious and
+degrading, but the actual war which was being waged in South Africa,
+the struggle of a people for existence and liberty, could be nothing but
+noble. He saw quite clearly what his own next step was to be, and there
+was no temptation to hesitate about it. He would place his money at Miss
+Goold’s disposal, and go himself with her ten volunteers to join the
+brigade of the heroic de Villeneuve.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+The prospect of joining Augusta Goold’s band of volunteers and going to
+South Africa to fight afforded Hyacinth great satisfaction. For two days
+he lived in an atmosphere of day-dreams and delightful anticipations. He
+had no knowledge whatever of the actual conditions of modern warfare.
+He understood vaguely that he would be called upon to endure great
+hardships. He liked to think of these, picturing himself bravely
+cheerful through long periods of hunger, heat, or cold. He had visions
+of night watches, of sudden alarms, of heart-stirring skirmishes, of
+scouting work, and stealthy approaches to the enemy’s lines. He thought
+out the details of critical interviews with commanding officers in
+which he with some chosen comrade volunteered for incredibly dangerous
+enterprises. He conceived of himself as wounded, though not fatally, and
+carried to the rear out of some bullet-swept firing-line. He was just
+twenty-three years of age. Adventure had its fascination, and the world
+was still a place full of splendid possibilities.
+
+At the end of his two days of dreaming he returned, flushed with his
+great purposes, to the realities of life. He went to Father Moran to
+tell him that he would not buy Durkan’s boat. He laughed to himself
+at the thought of doing such a thing. Was he to spend his life fishing
+mackerel round the rocky islands of Connemara, when he might be fighting
+like one of the ancient heroes, giving his strength, perhaps his life,
+for a great cause? The priest met him at the presbytery door.
+
+‘Come in, Mr. Conneally--come in and sit down. I was expecting you these
+two days. What were you doing at all, walking away there along the rocks
+by yourself? The people were beginning to say that you were getting to
+be like your poor father, and that nobody’d ever get any good out of
+you. But I knew you’d come back to me here. I hope now it’s to tell me
+that you’ll buy the boat you’ve come.’
+
+They entered the house, and the priest opened the door of the little
+sitting-room. Hyacinth knew it well. There was the dark mahogany table
+with the marks burnt into it where hot dishes were set down, the shabby
+arm-chair, the worn cocoanut-matting on the floor, the dozen or so books
+in the hanging shelf, the tawdry sacred pictures round the wall. He had
+known it all, and it all seemed unchanged since he was a child.
+
+‘Sit you down--sit you down,’ said the priest. ‘And now about the boat.’
+
+‘I’m not going in for her,’ said Hyacinth. ‘I’m as thankful to you for
+suggesting it as if I did buy her. I hope you’ll understand that, but
+I’m not going to buy her.’
+
+He found it difficult to speak of his new plan to Father Moran.
+
+‘Do you tell me that, now? I’m sorry for it. And why wouldn’t you buy
+her? What’s there to hinder you?’
+
+Hyacinth hesitated.
+
+‘Well, now,’ said the priest, ‘I can guess. I thought the auction turned
+out well for you, but I never heard for certain, and maybe you haven’t
+got the money for the boat. Whisht now, my son, and let me speak. I’m
+thinking the thing might be managed.’
+
+‘But, Father Moran------’
+
+‘Ah now, will you be quiet when I bid you? I haven’t the money myself.
+Never a penny have I been able to save all my life, with the calls there
+are on me in a parish like this. Sure, you know yourself how it is.
+There’s one will have a cow that has died on him, and another will be
+wanting a lock of potatoes for seed in the springtime; and if it isn’t
+that, it’ll be something else. And who would the creatures go to in
+their trouble but the old priest that christened and married the most
+of them? But, indeed, thanks be to God, things is improving. The fishing
+brings in a lot of money to the men, and there’s a better breed of
+cattle in the country now, and the pigs fetch a good price since we had
+the railway to Clifden, and maybe the last few years I might have saved
+a little, but I didn’t. Indeed, I don’t know where it is the money goes
+at all, but someway it’s never at rest in my breeches pockets till it’s
+up and off somewhere. God forgive us! it’s more careful we ought to be.’
+
+‘But, Father Moran, I don’t----’
+
+‘Arrah then, will you cease your talking for one minute, and let me get
+a word in edgeways for your own good? What was I saying? Oh, I was just
+after telling you I hadn’t got the money to help you. But maybe I might
+manage to get it. The man in the bank in Clifden knows me. I borrowed a
+few pounds off him two years ago when the Cassidys’ house and three more
+beside it got blown away in the big wind. Father Joyce put his name on
+the back of the bill along with my own, and trouble enough I had to get
+him to do it, for he said I ought to put an appeal in the newspapers,
+and I’d get the money given to me. But I never was one to go begging
+round the country. I said I’d rather borrow the money and pay it back
+like a decent man. And so I did, every penny of it. And I think the bank
+will trust me now, with just your name and mine, more especially as
+it’s to buy a boat we want the money. What do you say to that, now?’ He
+looked at Hyacinth triumphantly.
+
+‘Father Moran, you’re too good to me--you’re too good altogether. What
+did ever I do to deserve such kindness from you? But you’re all wrong.
+I’ve got plenty of money.’
+
+‘And why in the name of all that’s holy didn’t you tell me so at once,
+and not keep me standing here twisting my brains into hard knots with
+thinking out ways of getting what you don’t want? If you’ve got the
+money you’ll buy the boat. What better could you do with it?’
+
+‘But I don’t want to buy the boat. I don’t want to live here always. I’m
+going away out into the world. I want to see things and do things.’
+
+‘Out into the world! Will you listen to the boy? Is it America you’re
+thinking of? Ah, now, there’s enough gone out and left us lonely here.
+Isn’t the best of all the boys and girls going to work for the strangers
+in the strange land? and why would you be going after them?’
+
+‘I’m not going to America. I’m going to South Africa. I’m going to join
+some young Irishmen to fight for the Boers and for freedom.’
+
+‘You’re going out to fight--to fight for the Boers! What is it that’s in
+your head at all, Hyacinth Conneally? Tell me now.’
+
+Again Hyacinth hesitated. Was it possible to give utterance to the
+thoughts and hopes which filled his mind? Could he tell anyone about
+the furious fancies of the last few days, or of that weird vision of
+his father’s which lay at the back of what he felt and dreamed? Could
+he even speak of the enthusiasm which moved him to devote himself to the
+cause of freedom and a threatened nationality? In the presence of a man
+of the world the very effort to express himself would have acted as some
+corrosive acid, and stained with patches of absurdity the whole fabric
+of his dreams. He looked at Father Moran, and saw the priest’s eyes lit
+with sympathy. He knew that he had a listener who would not scoff, who
+might, perhaps, even understand. He began to speak, slowly and haltingly
+at first, then more rapidly. At last he poured out with breathless,
+incoherent speed the strange story of the Armageddon vision, the hopes
+that were in him, the fierce enthusiasm, the passionate love for
+Ireland which burnt in his soul. He was not conscious of the gaping
+inconsequences of his train of emotion. He did not recognise how
+ridiculous it was to connect the Boer War with the Apocalyptic battle
+of the saints, or the utter impossibility of getting either one or the
+other into any sort of relation with the existing condition of Ireland.
+
+A casual observer might have supposed that Hyacinth had made a mistake
+in telling his story to Father Moran. A smile, threatening actual
+laughter, hovered visibly round the priest’s mouth. His eyes had a
+shrewd, searching expression, difficult to interpret. Still, he listened
+to the rhapsody without interrupting it, till Hyacinth stopped abruptly,
+smitten with sudden self-consciousness, terrified of imminent ridicule.
+Nor were the priest’s first words reassuring.
+
+‘I wouldn’t say now, Hyacinth Conneally, but there might be the makings
+of a fine man in you yet.’
+
+‘I might have known,’ said Hyacinth angrily, ‘that you’d laugh at me. I
+was a fool to tell you at all. But I’m in earnest about what I’m going
+to do. Whatever you may think about the rest, there’s no laughing at
+that.’
+
+‘Well, you’re just wrong then, for I wasn’t laughing nor meaning to
+laugh at all. God forbid that I should laugh at you, and I meant it when
+I said that there was the makings of a fine man in you. Laugh at you!
+It’s little you know me. Listen now, till I tell you something; but
+don’t you be repeating it. This must be between you and me, and go no
+further. I was very much of your way of thinking myself once.’
+
+Hyacinth gazed at him in astonishment. The thought of Father Moran,
+elderly, rotund, kindly; of Father Moran with sugar-stick in his pocket
+for the school-children and a quaint jest on his lips for their mothers;
+of Father Moran in his ruffled silk hat and shabby black coat and baggy
+trousers--of this Father Moran mounted and armed, facing the British
+infantry in South Africa, was wholly grotesque. He laughed aloud.
+
+‘It’s yourself that has the bad manners to be laughing now,’ said
+the priest. ‘But small blame to you if it was out to the Boers I was
+thinking of going. The gray goose out there on the road might laugh--and
+she’s the solemnest mortal I know--at the notion of me charging along
+with maybe a pike in my hand, and the few gray hairs that’s left on the
+sides of my head blowing about in the breeze I’d make as I went prancing
+to and fro. But that’s not what I meant when I said that once upon a
+time I was something of your way of thinking. And sure enough I was, but
+it’s a long time ago now.’
+
+He sighed, and for a minute or two he said no more. Hyacinth began
+to wonder what he meant, and whether the promised confidence would be
+forthcoming at all. Then the priest went on:
+
+‘When I was a young man--and it’s hard for you to think it, but I was a
+fine young man; never a better lad at the hurling than I was, me that’s
+a doddering old soggarth now--when I was a boy, as I’m telling you,
+there was a deal of going to and fro in the country and meetings at
+night, and drillings too, and plenty of talk of a rising--no less.
+Little good came of it that ever I saw, but I’m not blaming the men that
+was in it. They were good men, Hyacinth Conneally--men that would have
+given the souls out of their bodies for the sake of Ireland. They would,
+sure, for they loved Ireland well. But I had my own share in the doings.
+Of course, it was before ever there was a word of my being a priest.
+That came after. Thanks be to God for His mercies’--the old man crossed
+himself reverently--‘He kept me from harm and the sin that might have
+been laid on me. But in those days there were great thoughts in me, just
+as there are in you to-day. Faith! I’m of opinion that my thoughts were
+greater than yours, for I was all for fighting here in Ireland, for the
+Poor Old Woman herself, and it’s out to some foreign war you’d be
+going to fight for people that’s not friends of yours by so much as one
+heart’s drop. Still, the feeling in you is the same as the feeling that
+was in me, not a doubt of it. But, indeed, so far as I’m concerned, it’s
+over and gone. I haven’t spoken to a mortal soul about such things these
+thirty years, and I wouldn’t be doing it now only just to show you that
+I’m the last man in Ireland that would laugh at you for what you’ve told
+me.’
+
+‘I’m glad I told you what’s in my heart,’ said Hyacinth; ‘I’d like to
+think I had your blessing with me when I go.’
+
+‘Well, you won’t get it,’ said Father Moran, ‘so I tell you straight.
+I’ll give you no blessing when you’re going away out of the country,
+just when there’s need of every man in it. I tell you this--and you’ll
+remember that I know what I’m talking about--it’s not men that ’ll fight
+who will help Ireland to-day, but men that will work.’
+
+‘Work!’ said Hyacinth--‘work! What work is there for a man like me to do
+in Ireland?’
+
+‘Don’t I offer you the chance of buying Thady Durkan’s boat? Isn’t there
+work enough for any man in her?’
+
+‘But that’s not the sort of work I ought to be doing. What good would
+it be to anyone but myself? What good would it be to Ireland if I caught
+boatloads of mackerel?’
+
+‘Don’t be making light of the mackerel, now. He’s a good fish if you get
+him fresh, and split him down and fry him with a lump of butter in the
+pan. There’s worse fish than the mackerel, as you’ll discover if you go
+to South Africa, and find yourself living on a bit of some ancient tough
+beast of an ostrich, or whatever it may happen to be that they eat out
+there.’
+
+In his exalted mood Hyacinth felt insulted at the praise of the mackerel
+and the laughter in the priest’s eyes when he suggested a dinner off
+ostrich. He held out his hand, and said good-bye.
+
+‘Wait, now--wait,’ said the priest; ‘don’t be in such a tearing hurry.
+I’ll talk as serious as you like, and not hurt your feelings, if you’ll
+stay for a minute or two. Listen, now. Isn’t the language dying on the
+people’s lips? They’re talking the English, more and more of them every
+day; and don’t you know as well as I do that when they lose their Irish
+they’ll lose half the good that’s in them? What sort will the next
+generation of our people be, with their own language gone from them, and
+their Irish ways forgotten, and all the old tales and songs and tunes
+perished away like the froth of the waves that the storm blew up across
+the fields the night your father died? I’ll tell you what they’ll
+be--just sham Englishmen. And the Lord knows the real thing is not the
+best kind of man in the world, but the copy of an Englishman! sure,
+that’s the poorest creature to be found anywhere on the face of God’s
+good earth. And that’s what we’ll be, when the Irish is gone from us.
+Wouldn’t there be work enough for you to do, now, if you were to buy
+Thady Durkan’s boat, and stay here and help to keep the people to the
+old tongue and the old ways?’
+
+Hyacinth shook his head. His mood was altogether too heroic to allow
+him to think highly of what the priest said to him. He loved the Irish
+language as his native speech--loved it, too, as a symbol, and something
+more, perhaps--as an expression of the nationality of Ireland. But it
+did not seem to him to be a very essential thing, and to spend his life
+talking it and persuading other people to talk it was an obscure kind of
+patriotism which made no strong appeal to him--which, indeed, could not
+stand compared to the glory of drawing the sword.
+
+‘You’ve listened to what I’ve told you, Father Moran, and you say that
+you understand what I feel, but I don’t think you really do, or else you
+wouldn’t fancy that I could be satisfied to stay here. What is it you
+ask of me? To spend my time fishing and talking Irish and dancing jigs.
+Ah! it’s well enough I’d like to do it. Don’t think that such a life
+wouldn’t be pleasant to me. It would be too pleasant. That’s what’s the
+matter with it. It’s a temptation, and not a duty, that you’re setting
+before me.’
+
+‘Maybe it is now--maybe it is. And if it’s that way you think of it,
+you’re right enough to say no to me. But for all that I understand you
+well enough. Who’s this now coming up to the house to see me?’ He went
+over to the window and looked out. ‘Isn’t it a queer life a priest lives
+in a place like this, with never a minute of quiet peace from morning to
+night but somebody will be coming interrupting and destroying it? First
+it’s you, Hyacinth Conneally--not that I grudge the time to you when
+you’re going off so soon--and now it’s Michael Kavanagh. Indeed, he’s
+a decent man too, like yourself. Come in, Michael--come in. Don’t be
+standing there pulling at the old door-bell. You know as well as myself
+it’s broken these two years. It’s heartbroken the thing is ever since
+that congested engineer put up the electric bell for me, and little
+use that was, seeing that Biddy O’Halloran--that’s my housekeeper, Mr.
+Conneally; you remember her--poured a jug of hot water into its inside
+the way it wouldn’t annoy her with ringing so loud. And why the noise
+of it vexed her I couldn’t say, for she’s as deaf as a post every time
+I speak to her. Ah, you’re there, Michael, are you? Now, what do you
+want?’
+
+A young farmer, black-haired, tall and straight, stood in the doorway
+with his hat in his hand. He had brought a paper for Father Moran’s
+signature. It related to a bull which the Congested Districts Board
+proposed to lend to the parish, and of which Kavanagh had been chosen
+to be custodian. A long conversation followed, conducted in Irish. The
+newly-erected habitation for the animal was discussed; then the best
+method of bringing him home from Clifden Station; then the kind of
+beast he was likely to turn out to be, and the suitability of particular
+breeds of cattle to the coarse, brine-soaked land of Carrowkeel.
+Kavanagh related a fearful tale of a lot of ‘foreign’ fowls which had
+been planted in the neighbourhood by the Board. They were particularly
+nice to look at, and settings of their eggs were eagerly booked long
+beforehand. Then one by one they sickened and died. Some people thought
+they died out of spite, being angered at the way they had been treated
+in the train. Kavanagh himself did not think so badly of them. He was of
+opinion that their spirits were desolated in them with the way the rain
+came through the roof of their house, and that their feet got sore with
+walking on the unaccustomed sea-sand. However their death was to be
+explained, he hoped that the bull would turn out to be hardier. Father
+Moran, on his part, hoped that the roof of the bull’s house would
+turn out to be sounder. In the end the paper was signed, and Kavanagh
+departed.
+
+‘Now, there,’ said the priest, ‘is a fine young man. Only for him, I
+don’t know how I’d get on in the parish at all. He’s got a head on his
+shoulders, and a notion of improving himself and his neighbours, and it
+would do you good to see him dance a jig. But why need I tell you that
+when you’ve seen him yourself? He is to be the secretary of the Gaelic
+League when we get a branch of it started in Carrowkeel. And a good
+secretary he’ll make, for his heart will be in the work. I dare say,
+now, you’ve heard of the League when you were up in Dublin. Well, you’ll
+hear more of it. By the time you’re back here again---- Now, don’t be
+saying that you’ll not come back. I’ll give you a year to get sick of
+fighting for the Boers, and then there’ll be a hunger on you for the old
+place that will bring you back to it in spite of yourself.’
+
+‘Good-bye, Father Moran. Whatever happens to me, I’ll not forget
+Carrowkeel nor you either. You’ve been good to me, and if I don’t take
+your advice and stay where I am, it’s not through want of gratitude.’
+
+The priest wrung his hand.
+
+‘You’ll come back. It may be after I’m dead and gone, but back you’ll
+come. Here or somewhere else in the old country you’ll spend your days
+working for Ireland, because you’ll have learnt that working is better
+than fighting.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+When Hyacinth got back to Dublin about the middle of February, the
+streets were gay with amateur warriors. The fever for volunteering,
+which laid hold on the middle classes after the series of regrettable
+incidents of the winter, raged violently among the Irish Loyalists.
+Nowhere were the recruiting officers more fervently besieged than in
+Dublin. Youthful squireens who boasted of being admirable snipe shots,
+and possessed a knowledge of all that pertained to horses, struggled
+with prim youths out of banks for the privilege of serving as troopers.
+The sons of plump graziers in the West made up parties with footmen
+out of their landlords’ mansions, and arrived in Dublin hopeful of
+enlistment. Light-hearted undergraduates of Trinity, drapers’ assistants
+of dubious character, and the crowd of nondescripts whose time is spent
+in preparing for examinations which they fail to pass, leaped at the
+opportunity of winning glory and perhaps wealth in South Africa. Those
+who were fortunate enough to be selected were sent to the Curragh to
+be broken in to their new profession. They were clothed, to their own
+intense delight, in that peculiar shade of yellow which is supposed to
+be a help to the soldier in his efforts not to be shot. Their legs were
+screwed into putties and breeches incredibly tight round the knees,
+which expanded rapidly higher up, and hung round their hips in
+voluminous folds. Their jackets were covered with a multiplicity of
+quaint little pockets, sewed on in unexpected places, and each provided
+with a flap which buttoned over it. The name of the artist who designed
+this costume has perished, nor does there remain any written record
+of the use which these tightly-secured pocket-covers were supposed to
+serve. Augusta Goold suggested that perhaps they were meant to prevent
+the troopers’ money from falling out in the event of any commanding
+officer ordering his men to receive the enemy standing on their heads.
+‘In the light of the intelligence displayed by the English Generals up
+to the present,’ she said, ‘the War Office is quite right to be prepared
+for such a thing happening.’
+
+It seemed possible to procure almost any amount of leave from the
+Curragh, and the yeomen delighted to spend it in promenading the
+fashionable streets of the metropolis. The tea-shops reaped a rich
+harvest from the regal way in which they treated their female relatives
+and friends. Indeed, their presence must have seriously disorganized the
+occupations by which young women earn their living. It was difficult to
+imagine that the sick in the hospitals could have been properly looked
+after, or the letters of solicitors typewritten, so great was the number
+of damsels who attached themselves to these attractive heroes. The
+philosophic observer found another curious subject for speculation in
+the fact that this parade of military splendour took place in a city
+whose population sympathized intensely with the Boer cause, and was
+accustomed to receive the news of a British defeat with delight. The
+Dublin artisan viewed the yeomen much as the French in Paris must have
+looked upon the allied troops who entered their city after Waterloo.
+The very name by which they were called had an anti-national sound, and
+suggested the performance of other amateur horse-soldiers in Wexford a
+century earlier.
+
+The little band whose writings filled the pages of the _Croppy_ were
+more than anyone else enraged at the flaunting of Imperialism in their
+streets. They had rejoiced quite openly after Christmas, and called
+attention every week in prose and poetry to the moribund condition of
+the British Empire, even boasting as if they themselves had borne a part
+in its humiliation. They were still in a position to assert that the
+Boers were victorious, and that the volunteers were likely to do no more
+than exhaust the prison accommodation at Pretoria. They could and did
+compose biting jests, but their very bitterness witnessed to a deep
+disappointment. It was not possible to deny that the despised English
+garrison in Ireland was displaying a wholly unlooked-for spirit. No one
+could have expected that West Britons and ‘Seonini’ would have wanted to
+fight. Very likely, when the time came, they would run away; but in
+the meanwhile here they were, swaggering through the streets of Dublin,
+outward and visible signs of a force in the country hostile to the hopes
+of the _Croppy_, a force that some day Republican Ireland would have to
+reckon with.
+
+Augusta Goold herself was more tolerant and more philosophic than her
+friends. She looked at the yeomen with a certain admiration. Their
+exuberant youthfulness, their strutting, and their obvious belief in
+themselves, made a strong appeal to her imagination.
+
+‘Look at that young man,’ she said to Hyacinth, pointing out a volunteer
+who passed them in the street. ‘I happen to know who he is. In fact, I
+knew his people very well indeed at one time, and spent a fortnight with
+them once when that young man was a toddler, and sometimes sat on my
+knee--at least, he may have sat on my knee. There were a good many
+children, and at this distance of time I can’t be certain which of them
+it was that used to worry me most during the hour before dinner. The
+father is a landlord in the North, and comes of a fine old family. He’s
+a strong Protestant, and English, of course, in all his sympathies.
+Well, a hundred years or so ago that boy’s great-grandfather was
+swaggering about these same streets in a uniform, just as his descendant
+is doing now. He helped to drag a cannon into the Phoenix Park one day
+with a large placard tied over its muzzle--“Our rights or----” Who do
+you think he was threatening? Just the same England that this boy is so
+keen to fight for to-day!’
+
+‘Ah,’ said Hyacinth, ‘you are thinking of the volunteer movement of
+1780.’
+
+‘Afterwards,’ she went on, ‘he was one of the incorruptibles. You’ll
+see his name on Jonah Barrington’s red list. He stood out to the
+last against the Union, wouldn’t be bribed, and fought two duels with
+Castlereagh’s bravoes. The curious thing is that the present man is
+quite proud of that ancestor in a queer, inconsistent sort of way. Says
+the only mark of distinction his family can boast of is that they didn’t
+get a Union peerage. Strange, isn’t it?’
+
+‘It is strange,’ said Hyacinth. ‘The Irish gentry of 1782 were men to be
+proud of; yet look at their descendants to-day.’
+
+‘It is very sad. Do you know, I sometimes think that Ireland will never
+get her freedom till those men take it for her. Almost every struggle
+that Ireland ever made was captained by her aristocracy. Think of the
+Geraldines and the O’Neills. Think of Sarsfield and the Wild Geese.
+Think of the men who wrenched a measure of independence from England in
+1782. Think of Lord Edward and Smith O’Brien. No, we may talk and write
+and agitate, but we’ll _do_ nothing till we get the old families with
+us.’
+
+Hyacinth laughed. It seemed to him that Miss Goold was deliberately
+talking nonsense, rejoicing in a paradox.
+
+‘We are likely to wait, if we wait for them. Look at those.’ He waved
+his hand towards a group of yeomen who were chatting at the street
+corner. ‘They are going to stamp out a nation in South Africa. Is it
+likely that they will create one here?’
+
+‘It is not likely’--she sighed as she spoke--‘yet stranger things than
+that have happened. Have you ever considered what the present English
+policy in Ireland really is? Do you understand that they are trying to
+keep us quiet by bribing the priests? They think that the Protestants
+are powerless, or that they will be loyal no matter what happens. But
+think: These Protestants have been accustomed for generations to regard
+themselves as a superior race. They conceive themselves to have a
+natural right to govern. Now they are being snubbed and insulted. There
+isn’t an English official from their Lord Lieutenant down but thinks he
+is quite safe in ignoring the Protestants, and is only anxious to
+make himself agreeable to the priests. That’s the beginning. Very soon
+they’ll be bullied as well as snubbed. They will stand a good deal of
+it, because, like most strong people, they are very stupid and slow at
+understanding; but do you suppose they will always stand it?’
+
+‘They’re English, and not Irish,’ said Hyacinth. ‘I suppose they like
+what their own people do.’
+
+‘It’s a lie. They are not English, though they say it themselves. In the
+end they will find out that they are Irish. Some day a last insult, a
+particularly barefaced robbery, or an intolerable oppression, will awake
+them. Then they’ll turn on the people that betrayed them. They will
+discover that Ireland--their Ireland--isn’t meant to be a cabbage-garden
+for Manchester, nor yet a _crêche_ for sucking priests. Ah! it will be
+good to be alive when they find themselves. We shall be within reach of
+the freedom of Ireland then.’
+
+Hyacinth was amazed at her vehement admiration for the class she was
+accustomed to anathematize. He turned her words over and over in his
+mind. They recalled, as so many different things seemed to do, his
+father’s vision of an Armageddon. Amid the confusion of Irish politics
+this thought of a Protestant and aristocratic revolt was strangely
+attractive; only it seemed to be wholly impossible. He bewildered
+himself in the effort to arrange the pieces of the game into some
+reasonable order. What was to be thought of a priesthood who, contrary
+to all the traditions of their Church, had nursed a revolution against
+the rights of property? or of a people, amazingly quick of apprehension,
+idealistic of temperament, who time after time submitted themselves
+blindfold to the tyranny of a single leader, worshipped a man, and asked
+no questions about his policy? How was he to place an aristocracy who
+refused to lead, and persisted in whining about their wrongs to the
+inattentive shopkeepers of English towns, gentlemen not wanting in
+honour and spirit courting a contemptuous bourgeoisie with ridiculous
+flatteries? In what reasonable scheme of things was it possible to
+place Protestants, blatant in their boasts about liberty, who hugged
+subjection to a power which deliberately fostered the growth of
+an ecclesiastical tyranny? Where amid this crazy dance of
+self-contradictory fanatics and fools was a sane man to find a place on
+which to stand? How, above all, was Ireland, a nation, to evolve itself?
+
+He turned with relief from these perplexities to the work that lay
+before him. However a man might worry and befog himself over the
+confused issues of politics, it was at all events a straightforward
+and simple matter to fight, and Hyacinth was going to the front as the
+eleventh Irish volunteer.
+
+To do Miss Goold justice, she had been extremely unwilling to enrol him,
+and had refused to take a penny of his money. Her conscience, such as
+it was after years of patriotic endeavour, rebelled against committing a
+young man whom she really liked to the companionship of the men she had
+enlisted and the care of their commander, Captain Albert Quinn.
+
+This gentleman, whom she daily expected in Dublin, belonged to County
+Mayo. He represented himself as a member of an ancient but impoverished
+family, boasted of his military experience, and professed to be
+profoundly skilled in all matters relating to horses. Miss Goold’s
+inquiries elicited the fact that he held an undefined position under
+his brother, a respectable manufacturer of woollen goods. His military
+experience had been gathered during the few months he held a commission
+in the militia battalion of the Connaught Rangers, an honourable
+position which he had resigned because his brother officers persistently
+misunderstood his methods of winning money at cards. No one, however,
+was found to deny that he really did possess a wonderful knowledge of
+horses. The worst that Miss Goold’s correspondents could suggest with
+regard to this third qualification was that he knew too much. None
+of these drawbacks to the Captain--he had assumed the title when he
+accepted the command of the volunteers--weighed with Miss Goold. Indeed,
+she admitted to Mary O’Dwyer, in a moment of frankness, that if her men
+weren’t more or less blackguards she couldn’t expect them to go out
+to South Africa. She did not speak equally plainly to Hyacinth. She
+recollected that he had displayed a very inconvenient kind of morality
+when she first knew him, and she believed him quite capable of breaking
+away from her influence altogether if he discovered the kind of men she
+was willing to work with.
+
+She did her best to persuade him to give up the idea of joining the
+force, by pointing out to him that he was quite unfitted for the work
+that would have to be done.
+
+‘You know nothing about horses,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever
+been on the back of one.’
+
+Hyacinth admitted that this was true. The inhabitants of Carrowkeel
+rarely ride their shaggy ponies, and when they do it is sitting sideways
+just above the creatures’ tails, with two creels for turf or seaweed in
+the place where the saddle ought to be.
+
+‘And I don’t suppose you know much about shooting?’
+
+Hyacinth was depressed, for he had never pulled a trigger in his life.
+In the West of Ireland a man is not allowed to possess a gun unless
+a resident magistrate will certify to his loyalty and harmlessness.
+Therefore, the inhabitants of villages like Carrowkeel are debarred from
+shooting either snipe or seals, and the British Empire stands secure.
+
+The difficulty about his horsemanship Hyacinth endeavoured to get over.
+He arranged with a car-driver of his acquaintance to teach him to groom
+and harness his horses. The man possessed two quadrupeds, which he
+described as ‘the yellow pony’ and ‘the little mare.’ Hyacinth began
+with the yellow pony, the oldest and staidest of the two. The little
+mare, who had a temper of her own, gave him more trouble. She disliked
+his way of putting the crupper under her tail, and one day, to her
+owner’s great delight, ‘rose the divil on them’ when her new groom got
+the shaft of the car stuck through her collar.
+
+The want of experience in shooting was more difficult to get over.
+Grealy owned an antiquated army rifle, which he lent to Hyacinth.
+It was, of course, entirely different from the Mauser, and it was
+impossible to get an opportunity for firing it off. However, there was
+some comfort to be found in handling the thing, and taking long and
+careful aim at a distant church spire through a window.
+
+In the face of such enthusiasm, Miss Goold could not refuse her recruit.
+She talked to him freely about her plans, and was eloquent about the
+spirit and abilities of M. de Villeneuve, who was to take charge of her
+soldiers after they joined him in Paris. On the subject of Captain Quinn
+she was much more reticent, and she refused altogether to introduce
+Hyacinth to his ten fellow troopers.
+
+‘There’s not the least necessity,’ she said, ‘for you to meet them until
+the time for starting comes. In fact, I may say it is safer for none of
+you to know each other.’
+
+Hyacinth experienced a thrill of agreeable excitement. He felt that he
+was engaged in a real conspiracy.
+
+‘For fear of informers?’ he asked.
+
+‘Yes. One never can be quite sure of anyone. Of course, they can every
+one of them give information against me. You can yourself, if you like.
+But no one can betray anyone else, and as long as the men are safe, it
+doesn’t matter what happens to me.’
+
+It was one of Miss Goold’s weaknesses that she imagined herself to be an
+object of hatred and dread to the Government, and nothing irritated her
+more than a suspicion that she was not being taken seriously.
+
+The first glimpse that Hyacinth got of the character of the men among
+whom he was to serve came to him through Tim Halloran. Tim was still
+sore from the scolding he had been given for his conduct at the
+Rotunda meeting, and missed no opportunity of scoffing--not, of course,
+publicly, but among his friends--at Miss Goold and her volunteers.
+Hyacinth avoided him as much as possible, but one evening he walked up
+against him on the narrow footway at the corner of George’s Street.
+Halloran was delighted, and seized him by the arm.
+
+‘You’re the very man I wanted to see,’ he said. ‘Have you heard about
+Doherty?’
+
+Hyacinth knew no one called Doherty. He said so, and tried to escape,
+but Halloran held him fast.
+
+‘Not know Doherty! How’s that? I thought you were in all dear Finola’s
+secrets. Faith! I heard you were going out to fight for the Boers
+yourself. I didn’t believe it, of course. You wouldn’t be such a
+fool. But I thought you’d know that Doherty is one of the ten precious
+recruits, or, rather, _was_ one of them.’ He laughed loudly. ‘He’ll
+fight on the other side now, if he fights at all.’
+
+‘What do you mean?’ asked Hyacinth uneasily.
+
+He was not at all sure what view the authorities in Dublin Castle might
+take of recruiting for the Boer service, and Miss Goold’s hints about
+informers recurred to his mind alarmingly. Perhaps this Doherty was an
+informer.
+
+‘Well,’ said Halloran, ‘I was in one of the police-courts this morning
+doing my work for the _Evening Star_. You know I report the police news
+for that rag, don’t you? Well, I do. My column is called “The Doom of
+the Disorderly.” Rather a good title that for a column of the kind!
+There didn’t appear to be anything particular on, just a few ordinary
+drunks, until this fellow Doherty was brought in. I thought I recognised
+him, and when I heard his name I was certain of my man. He hadn’t done
+anything very bad--assaulted a tram-conductor, or some such trifle--and
+would have got off with a fine. However, a military man turned up and
+claimed him as a deserter. His real name, it appears, is Johnston. He
+deserted six weeks ago from the Dublin Fusiliers.’
+
+‘How on earth did he impose on Miss Goold?’ asked Hyacinth.
+
+Halloran looked at him curiously.
+
+‘Oh, I shouldn’t say he exactly imposed upon Finola. She’s not precisely
+a fool, you know, and she has pretty accurate information about most of
+the people she deals with.’
+
+‘But surely------’
+
+Halloran shrugged his shoulders.
+
+‘My dear fellow, I don’t want to shatter your ideal, but the beautiful
+Finola wants to work a revolution, and you can’t do that sort of thing
+without soiling your hands. However, whether he imposed on her or not,
+there’s no doubt about it that he was a deserter. Why, it appeared that
+the fool was tattooed all over the arms and chest, and the military
+people had a list of the designs. They had a perfectly plain case, and,
+indeed, Doherty made no defence.’
+
+‘What will they do with him?’ said Hyacinth, still uneasy about the
+possibility of Doherty’s volunteering information.
+
+‘I don’t know,’ said Halloran. ‘I should think the best punishment would
+be to send him out to Ladysmith. I dare say the Boers would pass him
+in if the circumstances were explained to them. By the way, it would be
+rather funny if he met the other nine out there on a kopje, wouldn’t it?
+He might take them prisoners, or they might capture him. Either way the
+situation would have its comic possibilities.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+Miss Goold lived that part of her life which was not spent at political
+meetings or in the office of the _Croppy_ in a villa at Killiney. A
+house agent would have described it as a most desirable residence,
+standing in its own grounds, overlooking the sea. Its windows opened
+upon one of the best of the many beautiful views of Dublin Bay. Its
+half-acre of pleasure ground--attended to by a jobbing gardener once a
+week--was trim and flowery. Its brown gate shone with frequently renewed
+paint, and the drive up to the door was neatly raked. Inside
+Miss Goold’s wants were ministered to by an eminently respectable
+man-servant, his wife who cooked, and a maid. The married couple were
+fixtures, and had been with Miss Goold since she started housekeeping.
+The maids varied. They never quarrelled with their mistress, but they
+found it impossible to live with their fellow-servants. Mr. and Mrs.
+Ginty were North of Ireland Protestants of the severest type. Ginty
+himself was a strong Orangeman, and his wife professed and enforced a
+strict code of morals. It did not in the least vex Miss Goold to
+know that her servants’ quarters were decorated with portraits of the
+reigning family in gilt frames, or that King William III. pranced on a
+white charger above the kitchen range. Nor had she any objection to her
+butler invoking a nightly malediction on the Pope over his tumbler of
+whisky-and-water. Unfortunately, her maids--the first three were Roman
+Catholics--found that their religious convictions were outraged, and
+left, after stormy scenes. The red-haired Protestant from the North who
+followed them was indifferent to the eternal destiny of Leo XIII., but
+declined to be dictated to by Mrs. Ginty about the conduct of her love
+affairs. Miss Goold, to whom the quarrel was referred, pleaded the
+damsel’s cause, and suggested privately that not even a policeman--she
+had a low opinion of the force--could be swept away from the path of
+respectability by a passion for so ugly a girl. Mrs. Ginty pointed out
+in reply that red hair and freckles were no safeguard when a flirtation
+is carried on after dark. There seemed no answer to this, and the maid
+returned indignantly to Ballymena. She was succeeded by an anaemic and
+wholly incompetent niece of Mrs. Ginty’s, who lived in such terror of
+her aunt that peace settled upon the household. Miss Goold suspected
+that this girl did little or no work--was, in fact, wholly unfit for her
+position; but so long as she herself was made comfortable, it did not
+seem to matter who tidied away her clothes or dusted her bedroom.
+
+Miss Goold, in fact, had so far mastered the philosophy of life as to
+understand that the only real use of money is to purchase comfort and
+freedom from minor worries. She had deliberately cut herself adrift from
+the social set to which she belonged by birth and education, and so had
+little temptation to spend her substance either in giving parties
+or enjoying them. The ladies who flutter round the Lord Lieutenant’s
+hospitable court would as soon have thought of calling on a music-hall
+danseuse as on Miss Goold. Their husbands, brothers, and sons took
+liberties with her reputation in the smoking-rooms of the Kildare Street
+Club, and professed to be in possession of private information about
+her life which placed her outside the charity of even their tolerant
+morality. The little circle of revolutionary politicians who gathered
+round the _Croppy_ were not the sort of people who gave dinner-parties;
+and there is, in spite of the Gospel precept, a certain awkwardness
+nowadays in continually asking people to dinner who cannot afford a
+retributive invitation. Occasionally, however, Miss Goold did entertain
+a few of her friends, and it was generally admitted among them that she
+not only provided food and drink of great excellence, but arranged the
+appointments of her feasts luxuriously.
+
+On the very day after his interview with Tim Halloran Hyacinth received
+an invitation to dinner at the Killiney villa. Captain Quinn, the
+note informed him, had arrived in Dublin, and was anxious to make the
+acquaintance of his future comrade-in-arms. It seemed to Hyacinth,
+thinking over the story of Doherty, unlikely that the whole corps would
+be asked to meet their Captain round a dinner-table, but he hoped that
+some of them would be there. Their presence would reconcile him to the
+awkwardness of not possessing a dress-suit. Grealy, who had occasionally
+dined at the villa, warned him that a white shirt-front and black
+trousers would certainly be expected of him, and Hyacinth made an
+unsuccessful effort to hire garments for the night which would fit him.
+In the end, since it seemed absurd to purchase even a second-hand suit
+for a single evening, he brushed his Sunday clothes and bought a pair of
+patent-leather shoes.
+
+He arrived at the platform of Westland Row Station in good time for
+the train he meant to catch. He was soon joined by Miss O’Dwyer, who
+appeared with her head and neck swathed in a fluffy shawl and the train
+of a silk skirt gathered in her hand. The view of several flounces of
+nebulous white petticoat confirmed Hyacinth in his conjecture that she
+was bound for Miss Goold’s party. No one who could be supposed to be a
+member of Captain Quinn’s corps appeared on the platform, and Hyacinth
+became painfully conscious of the shortcomings of his costume. He
+thought that even Miss O’Dwyer glanced at it with some contempt. He
+wished that, failing a dress-suit, he could have imitated the Imperial
+Yeomen who paraded the streets, and donned some kind of uniform. His
+discomfort reached a climax when Ginty received them at the door, passed
+Miss O’Dwyer on to the incompetent niece, and solemnly extracted the new
+shoes from their brown-paper parcel.
+
+Miss Goold stood chatting to Captain Quinn when Hyacinth entered the
+drawing-room. She moved forward to meet him, radiant and splendid, he
+thought, beyond imagination. The rustle of her draperies, the faint
+scent that hung around her, and the glitter of the stones on her throat,
+bewildered him.
+
+It was not till after he had been presented to his commander that he was
+able to take his eyes off her. Then, in spite of his embarrassment, he
+experienced surprise and disappointment. He had formed no clear idea
+of what he expected Captain Quinn to be like, but he had a vague mental
+picture of a furiously-moustachioed swashbuckler, a man of immense power
+and hirsute hands. Instead, there stood before him a slim, small man,
+clean shaved, with shiny black hair smoothly brushed. His clothes were
+so well cut and his linen so glossy that he seemed fittingly placed even
+beside the magnificent Finola. His hand, when Hyacinth shook it, seemed
+absurdly small, and his feet, in their neat pumps, were more like a
+woman’s than a man’s. Then, when he turned to resume his conversation
+with his hostess, Hyacinth was able to watch his face. He noticed
+the man’s eyes. They were small and quick, like a bird’s, and shifted
+rapidly, never resting long on any object. His mouth was seldom closed,
+and the lips, like the eyes, moved incessantly, though very slightly.
+There were strange lines about the cheeks and jaws, which somehow
+suggested that the man had seen a good deal of the evil of the world,
+and not altogether unwillingly. His voice was wonderfully soft and
+clear, and he spoke without a trace of any provincial accent.
+
+During dinner Captain Quinn took the largest share in the conversation.
+It appeared that he was a man of considerable knowledge of the world. He
+had been a sailor in his time, and had made two voyages to Melbourne
+as apprentice in a large sailing-ship. His stories were interesting and
+humorously told; though they all dealt with experiences of his own, he
+never allowed himself to figure as anything of a hero. He recounted,
+for instance, how one night in Melbourne Docks he had run from a
+half-drunken Swede, armed with a knife, and had spent hours dodging
+round the deck of a ship and calling for help before he could get his
+assailant arrested. His career as an officer in the mercantile navy was
+cut short by a period of imprisonment in a small town in Madagascar.
+He did not specify his offence, but gave a vivid account of life in the
+gaol.
+
+‘There were twenty of us altogether,’ he said--‘nineteen niggers and
+myself. There was no nonsense about discipline or work. We just sat
+about all day in an open courtyard, with nothing but a big iron gate
+between us and liberty. All the same, there was very little chance
+of escape. There were always four black soldiers on guard, truculent
+scoundrels with curly swords. A sort of missionary man got wind of my
+being there, and used to come and visit me. One day he gave me a tract
+called “Gideon.” I read the thing because I had absolutely nothing else
+to read. In the end it turned out an extremely useful tract, for it
+occurred to me that the old plan for defeating the Midianites might
+work with the four black soldiers. I organized the other prisoners, and
+divided them into three bands. We raked up a pretty fair substitute
+for pitchers and lamps. Then one night we played off the stratagem, and
+flurried the sentries to such an extent that I got clear away. I rather
+fancy one or two others got off, too, but I don’t know. I got into a
+rather disagreeable tramp steamer, and volunteered as stoker. It’s so
+difficult to get stokers in the tropics that the captain took his risks
+and kept me. I must say I was sorry afterwards that I hadn’t stayed in
+the gaol.’
+
+The story was properly appreciated by the audience, and Hyacinth began
+to feel a liking for the Captain.
+
+‘Do you know,’ said Miss Goold, when their laughter had subsided, ‘I
+believe I know that identical tract. I once had an evangelical aunt, a
+dear old lady who went about her house with a bunch of keys in a small
+basket. She used to give me religious literature. I never was reduced to
+reading it, but I distinctly remember a picture of Gideon with his mouth
+open waving a torch on the front page. Could it have been the same?’
+
+‘It must have been,’ said the Captain. ‘Mine had that picture, too.
+Gideon had nothing on but a sort of nightshirt with a belt to it, and
+only one sleeve. By the way, if you are up in tracts, perhaps you know
+one called “The Rock of Horeb “?’
+
+Miss Goold shook her head.
+
+‘Ah, well,’ said the Captain, after appealing to Mary O’Dwyer and
+Hyacinth, ‘it can’t be helped, but I must say I should like to meet
+someone who had read “The Rock of Horeb.” I once sailed from Peru in
+an exceedingly ill-found little barque loaded with guano. We had a very
+dull time going through the tropics, and absolutely the only thing to
+read on board was the first half of “The Rock of Horeb.” There were at
+least two pages missing. I read it until I nearly knew it off by heart,
+and ever since I’ve been trying to get a complete copy to see how it
+ended.’
+
+Some of his stories dealt with more civilized life. He delighted Miss
+Goold with an account, not at all unfriendly, of the humours of
+the third battalion of the Connaught Rangers. He quoted one of Mary
+O’Dwyer’s poems to her, and pleased Hyacinth by his enthusiastic
+admiration of the Connemara scenery. Good food, good wine, and a
+companion like Captain Quinn, gladden the heart, and the little party
+was very merry when Ginty deposited coffee and cigarettes and finally
+departed.
+
+In Miss Goold’s house it was not the custom for the ladies to desert
+the dinner-table by themselves. Very often the hostess was the only lady
+present, and she had the greatest dislike to leaving a conversation just
+when it was likely to become really interesting. Moreover, Miss Goold
+smoked, not because it was a smart or emancipated thing to do, but
+because she liked it, and--a curious note of femininity about her--she
+objected to her drawing-room smelling of tobacco.
+
+When Ginty had disappeared, and the serious business of enjoying the
+food was completed, the talk of the party turned on the South African
+campaign and the prospects of the Irish volunteers. Captain Quinn
+displayed a considerable knowledge of the operations both of the Boers
+and the British Generals. For the latter he expressed what appeared to
+Hyacinth to be an exaggerated contempt, but the two ladies listened
+to it with evident enjoyment. He delighted Miss Goold by his extreme
+eagerness to be off.
+
+‘I don’t see,’ he said, ‘why we shouldn’t start to-morrow.’
+
+‘I’m afraid that’s out of the question,’ said Augusta Goold. ‘M. de
+Villeneuve arranged to send me a wire when he was ready for our men, and
+I can’t well send them sooner.’
+
+‘Ah,’ said the Captain, ‘but it seems to me the Frenchman is inclined
+to dawdle. Don’t you think that if we went over it might hurry him up a
+bit?’
+
+She agreed that this was possible, but represented the difficulty of
+keeping the men suitably employed in Paris for perhaps three weeks or a
+month.
+
+‘You see,’ she said, ‘they are all right here in Dublin, where I can
+keep an eye on them. Besides, they have all got some sort of employment
+here, and I don’t have to pay them. I haven’t got money enough to keep
+them in Paris, and they won’t get anything from Dr. Leyds until you have
+them on board the steamer.’
+
+Captain Quinn seemed satisfied, but later on in the evening he returned
+to the subject.
+
+‘I can’t help feeling that it would be better for me, at all events, to
+go over to Paris at once. I shouldn’t ask to draw any pay at present. I
+have enough by me to keep me going for a few weeks.’
+
+‘But what about the men? Will you come back for them?’
+
+‘No, I think that would be foolish and unnecessary. There is no use in
+attracting attention to our movements. We can’t have a public send-off,
+with cheers and that sort of thing, in any case, or march through the
+streets like those ridiculous yeomen. Our fellows have got to slip
+away quietly in twos and threes. We can’t tell whether we’re not being
+watched this minute.’
+
+There was a note of sincerity in the Captain’s voice which convinced
+Hyacinth that he was genuinely frightened at the thought of having a
+policeman on his track. Miss Goold, too, looked appropriately solemn at
+the suggestion. As a matter of fact, the authorities in Dublin Castle
+did occasionally send a detective in plain clothes to walk after her.
+It is not conceivable that they suspected her of wanting to blow up
+Nelson’s pillar or assassinate a judge. Probably they merely wished to
+exercise the members of the force, and, in the absence of any actual
+crime in the country, felt that no harm could come to anyone through the
+‘shadowing’ of Miss Goold. The plan, though the authorities probably did
+not consider this, had the incidental advantage of gratifying the lady
+herself. She was perfectly acquainted with most of the officers who were
+put on her track, and was always in good spirits when she recognised one
+of them waiting for her in Westland Row Station. Captain Quinn kept a
+watch on her face with his sharp shifting eyes while he spoke, and he
+was quick to realize that he had hit on a way of flattering her.
+
+‘You are a person, Miss Goold, of whose actions the Government is bound
+to take cognisance. I dare say they have their suspicions of me, and if
+you and I are seen together in Dublin during the next week or two there
+will certainly be inquiries; whereas, if I go over to Paris at once,
+there will be no reason to watch you or anybody else.’
+
+Augusta Goold hesitated.
+
+‘What do you say, Mr. Conneally?’ she asked.
+
+Hyacinth was puzzled at this extreme eagerness to be off. A suspicion
+crossed his mind that the Captain meditated some kind of treachery. He
+made what appeared to him to be a brilliant suggestion.
+
+‘Let me go with Captain Quinn. I can start to-morrow if necessary. I
+should like to see something of Paris; and you know, Miss Goold, I’ve
+plenty of money.’
+
+He thought it likely that the Captain would object to this plan. If
+he meditated any kind of crooked dealing when he got to Paris, though
+Hyacinth failed to see any motive for treachery, he would not want to be
+saddled with a companion. The answer he received surprised him.
+
+‘Delightful! I shall be glad to have a friend with me. In the intervals
+of military preparation we can have a gay time--not too gay, of course,
+Miss Goold. I shall keep Mr. Conneally out of serious mischief. When we
+have a little spare cash we may as well enjoy ourselves. We shan’t want
+to carry money about with us in the Transvaal. We mean to live at the
+expense of the English out there.’
+
+Augusta Goold smiled almost maternally at Hyacinth.
+
+‘My dear boy,’ she said, ‘what seems plenty of money to you won’t go
+very far in Paris. What is it? Let me see, you said two hundred pounds,
+and you want to buy your outfit out of that. Keep a little by you in
+case of accident.’
+
+‘Well,’ said the Captain, ‘that’s settled. And if we are really to start
+to-morrow, we ought to get home to-night. Mr. Conneally may be ready
+to start at a moment’s notice, but he must at least pack up his
+tooth-brush. May we see you safe back to town, Miss O’Dwyer? Remember,
+we shall expect a valedictory ode in the next number of the _Croppy_.
+Write us something that will go to a tune, something with a swing in it,
+and we’ll sing it beside the camp fires on the veldt. Miss Goold’--he
+held out his hand as he spoke--‘I’m a plain fellow’--he did not look in
+the least as if he thought so--‘I’ve led too rough a life to be any good
+at making pretty speeches, but I’m glad I’ve seen you and talked to you.
+If I’m knocked on the head out there I shall go under satisfied, for
+I’ve met a woman fit to be a queen--a woman who is a queen, the queen of
+the heart of Ireland.’
+
+It is likely that Augusta Goold, though she was certainly not a fool,
+was a little excited by the homage, for she refused to say good-bye,
+declaring that she would see the boat off next morning. It was a promise
+which would cost her something to keep, for the mail steamer leaves at 8
+a.m., and Miss Goold was a lady who appreciated the warmth of her bed in
+the mornings, especially during the early days of March, when the wind
+is likely to be in the east.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+Captain Quinn made himself very agreeable to Mary O’Dwyer during the
+short journey back to Dublin. At Westland Row he saw her into a cab,
+which he paid for. His last words were a reminder that he would expect
+to have her war-song, music and all, sent after him to Paris. Then he
+turned to Hyacinth.
+
+‘That’s all right. We’ve done with her. It was better to pay the cab for
+her, else she might have scrupled about taking one, and we should have
+been obliged to go home with her in a beastly tram. Come along. I’m
+staying at the Gresham. It’s always as well to go to a decent place
+if you have any money. You come with me, and we’ll have a drink and a
+talk.’
+
+There were two priests and a Bishop in earnest conference round the
+fire in the hall of the hotel when they entered. When he discovered that
+their talk was of the iniquities of the National Board of Education, and
+therefore likely to last beyond midnight, Captain Quinn led the way into
+the smoking-room, which was unoccupied. A sufficient supply of whisky
+and a syphon of soda-water were set before them. The Captain stretched
+himself in a comfortable chair, and lit his pipe.
+
+‘A fine woman, Miss Goold,’ he said meditatively. Hyacinth murmured an
+assent.
+
+‘A very fine woman, and apparently pretty comfortably off. I wonder why
+on earth she does it.’
+
+He looked at Hyacinth as if he expected some sort of explanation to be
+forthcoming.
+
+‘Does what?’ asked Hyacinth at length.
+
+‘Oh, all this revolutionary business: the _Croppy_, seditious speeches,
+and now this rot about helping the Boers. What does she stand to gain by
+it? I don’t suppose there’s any money in the business, and a woman
+like that might get all the notoriety she wants in her own proper set,
+without stumping the country and talking rot.’
+
+This way of looking at Augusta Goold’s patriotism was new to Hyacinth,
+and he resented it.
+
+‘I suppose she believes in the principles she professes,’ he said.
+
+The Captain looked at him curiously, and then took a drink of his
+whisky-and-soda.
+
+‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s suppose she does. After all, her motives are
+nothing to us, and she’s a damned fine woman, whatever she does it for.’
+
+He drank again.
+
+‘It would have been very pleasant, now, if she would have spent the next
+few weeks with me in Paris. You won’t mind my saying that I’d rather
+have had her than you, Conneally, as a companion in a little burst.
+However, I saw at once that it wouldn’t do. Anyone with an eye in his
+head could tell at a glance that she wasn’t that sort.’
+
+He sighed. Hyacinth was not quite sure that he understood. The
+suggestion was so calmly made and reasoned on that it seemed impossible
+that it could be as iniquitous as it appeared.
+
+‘There’s no one such an utter fool about women,’ went on the Captain,
+‘as your respectable married man, who never does anything wrong himself.
+I’d heard of Miss Goold, as everybody has, and listened to discussions
+about her character. You know just as well as I do the sort of things
+they say about her.’
+
+Hyacinth did know very well, and flared up in defence of his patroness.
+
+‘They are vile lies.’
+
+‘That’s just what I’m saying. Those respectable people who tell the lies
+are such fools. They think that every woman who doesn’t mew about
+at afternoon parties must be a bad one. Now, anyone with a little
+experience would know at once that Miss Goold--what’s this the other
+one called her? Oh yes, Finola--that Finola may be a fool, but she’s not
+_that_.’
+
+He pulled himself together as he spoke. Evidently he plumed himself, on
+his experience and the faculty for judging it had brought him.
+
+‘Now, I’d just as soon have asked my sister-in-law to come to Paris with
+me for a fortnight as Finola. You don’t know Mrs. James Quinn, I think.
+That’s a pity. She’s the most domesticated and virtuous _haus-frau_ in
+the world.’
+
+He paused, and then asked Hyacinth, ‘Why are you doing it?’
+
+Again Hyacinth was reduced by sheer surprise to a futility.
+
+‘Doing what?’
+
+‘Oh, going out to fight for the Boers. Now, don’t, like a good fellow,
+say you’re acting on principle. It’s all well enough to give Finola
+credit for that kind of thing. She is, as we agreed, a splendid woman.
+But you mustn’t ask me to believe in the whole corps in the same way.’
+
+Hyacinth meditated a reply. It was clearly impossible to assert that
+he wanted to fight for liberty, to give his life to the cause of an
+oppressed nationality. It would be utterly absurd to tell the story of
+his father’s vision, and say that he looked on the South African War
+as a skirmish preliminary to the Armageddon. Sitting opposite to this
+cynical man of the world and listening to his talk, Hyacinth came
+himself to disbelieve in principle. He felt that there must be some
+baser motive at the bottom of his desire to fight, only, for the life of
+him, he could not remember what it was. He could not even imagine a good
+reason--good in the estimation of his companion--why anyone should do so
+foolish a thing as go out to the Transvaal. The Captain was not at all
+impatient. He sat smoking quietly, until there seemed no prospect of
+Hyacinth answering; then he said:
+
+‘Well, if you don’t want to tell me, I don’t mind. Only I think you’re
+foolish. You see, little accidents happen in these affairs. There are
+such things as bullets, and one of them might hit you somewhere that
+would matter. Then it would be my duty to send home your last words to
+your sorrowing relatives, and it would be easier to do that if I knew
+exactly what you had done. The death-bed repentance of the prodigal
+is always most consoling to the elder brother--much more consoling, in
+fact, than the prodigal’s return. Now, how the deuce am I to make up a
+plausible repentance for you, if I don’t know what you’ve done?’
+
+‘But I’ve not done anything,’ said Hyacinth ineffectively.
+
+The Captain ignored him.
+
+‘Come, now, it can’t be anything very bad at your age. Have you got
+into a mess with a girl? Or’--he brightened up at the guess--‘are
+you hopelessly enamoured of the beautiful Finola? That would be most
+suitable. The bold, bad woman sends the minstrel boy to his death,
+with his wild harp slung behind him. I could draw tears from the
+stoniest-hearted elder brother over that.’
+
+If he could have thought of a crime at the moment, Hyacinth would
+probably have confessed it; but he was bewildered, and could hit on
+nothing better than:
+
+‘I have no elder brother--in fact, no relation of any sort.’
+
+‘Lucky man! Now, I have a perfect specimen of a brother--James Quinn,
+Esquire, of Ballymoy. He’s a churchwarden. Think of that! If it should
+be your melancholy duty to send the message home to him--in case that
+bullet hits me, I mean--tell him------ Oh, there’s no false pride about
+me. Fill your glass again. I don’t in the least mind your knowing that I
+wouldn’t go a step to fight for Boer or Briton either if it wasn’t for a
+little affair connected with some horses and a cheque. You see, the War
+Office people sent down a perfect idiot to buy remounts for the cavalry
+in Galway and Mayo. He was the sort of idiot that would tempt an
+Archbishop to swindle him. I rather overdid it, I’m afraid, and now the
+matter is likely to come out.’
+
+For all his boasted powers of observation, Captain Quinn failed to
+notice the disgust and alarm on Hyacinth’s face.
+
+‘I stuck the fool,’ he went on, ‘with every old screw in the country. I
+got broken-winded mares from the ploughs. I collected a regular hospital
+of spavined, knock-kneed beasts, and he took them from me without a word
+at thirty pounds apiece. It would have been all right if I had gone no
+further. But, hang it all! I got to the end of my tether. I declare to
+you I don’t believe there was another screw left in the whole county of
+Mayo, and unless I took to selling him the asses I couldn’t go on. Then
+I heard of this plan of your friend Finola’s, and I determined to make
+a little coup and clear. I altered a cheque. The idiot was on his way to
+an out-of-the-way corner of Connemara looking for mounted infantry cobs.
+I knew he wouldn’t see his bank-book for at least a week, so I chanced
+it. That’s the reason why I am so uncommonly anxious to get clear at
+once. If I once get off, it will be next door to impossible to get me
+back again. General Joubert will hardly give me up. I’m not the least
+afraid of those ridiculous policemen who walk about after Finola. But
+I am very much afraid of being tapped on the shoulder for reasons
+quite non-political. I can tell you I’ve been on the jump ever since
+yesterday, when I cashed the cheque, and I shan’t feel easy till I’ve
+left France behind me. I fancy I’m safe for the present. The idiot is
+sure to try fifty ways of getting his accounts straight before he lights
+on my little cheque; and when he does, I’ve covered my tracks pretty
+well. My dear brother hasn’t the slightest notion what’s become of me.
+I dare say he’ll stop making inquiries as soon as the police begin. Poor
+old chap! He’ll feel it about the family name, and so on.’
+
+He smiled at his own reflection in the mirror over the chimneypiece. He
+was evidently well satisfied with the performance he had narrated. Then
+at last Hyacinth found himself able to speak. Again, as when he had
+defeated Dr. Spenser in the college lecture-room, his own coolness
+surprised him.
+
+‘You’re an infernal blackguard!’ he said.
+
+Captain Quinn looked at him with a surprise that was perfectly genuine.
+He doubted if he could have heard correctly.
+
+‘What did you say?’
+
+‘I said,’ repeated Hyacinth, ‘you are an infernal blackguard!’
+
+‘Did you really suppose that I would be going on this fool of an
+expedition if I wasn’t?’
+
+‘I shall tell Miss Goold the story you have just told me. I shall tell
+her to-morrow morning before the boat sails.’
+
+‘Very well,’ said the Captain; ‘but don’t suppose for a moment that
+you’ll shock Finola. She doesn’t know this particular story about me,
+but I expect she knows another every bit as bad, and I dare say she will
+regard the whole thing as a justifiable spoiling of the Egyptians. By
+the way ‘--there was a note of anxiety in his voice--‘I hope you won’t
+find it necessary to repeat anything I’ve said about the lady herself.
+_That_ might irritate her.’
+
+‘Is it likely,’ said Hyacinth, ‘that I would repeat that kind of talk to
+any woman?’
+
+‘Quite so. I admire your attitude. Such things are entirely unfit for
+repetition. But seriously, now, what on earth do you expect to happen
+when you tell her? I’m perfectly certain that every single volunteer
+she’s got is just as great a blackguard--your word, my dear fellow--as I
+am, and Finola knows it perfectly well.’
+
+Hyacinth hesitated. The phrase in Miss Goold’s letter in which she had
+originally described her men as blackguards recurred to his mind. He
+remembered the story of Doherty. His anger began to give way to a sick
+feeling of disgust.
+
+‘Think, now,’ said the Captain: ‘is it likely that you could enlist a
+corps of Sunday-school teachers for this kind of work? I’ll give you
+credit for the highest motives, though I’m blest if I understand them;
+but how can you suppose that there is anyone else in the whole world
+that feels the way you feel or wants to act as you are doing?’
+
+‘I dare say you are right,’ said Hyacinth feebly.
+
+‘Of course I’m right--perfectly right.’
+
+Hyacinth tried to lift his glass of whisky-and-water to his lips, but
+his hand trembled, and he was obliged to put it down. Captain Quinn
+watched him wipe the spilt liquid off his hand, and then settle down in
+his chair with his head bowed and his eyes half shut.
+
+‘Sit up, man,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. You’ve done nothing to be
+ashamed of, at all events. But look here, you ought not to come with us
+at all. It’s no job for a man like you. You back out of it. Don’t turn up
+to-morrow morning. I’ll explain to Finola if she’s there, and if not
+I’ll write her a letter that will set you straight with her. I’m really
+sorry for you, Conneally.’
+
+Hyacinth looked up at him.
+
+‘I’m sorry I called you a blackguard,’ he said. ‘You’re not any worse
+than everyone else in the world.’
+
+‘Nonsense,’ said Captain Quinn. ‘Don’t take it like that. From your
+point of view you were quite right to call me a blackguard. And, mind
+you, there are plenty of people in the world who aren’t blackguards.
+There’s my brother, for instance. He’s a bit of a prig--in fact, he’s
+as priggish as he well can be--but he’s never done anything but run
+straight. I don’t suppose he could go crooked if he tried.’
+
+Hyacinth got up.
+
+‘Good-night,’ he said, ‘and good-bye. I shan’t go with you.’
+
+‘Wait a minute,’ said Captain Quinn. ‘I think I’ve done you one good
+turn to-night in stopping you going to South Africa. Now I’ll do you
+another, and one at the same time to that brother of mine. I left him
+in a hurry. I told you that, but I don’t think I mentioned that I was in
+his employment. He runs a woollen factory down in Mayo. I owned a
+share in the business once, but that went long ago, and the whole thing
+belongs to James now. I was a sort of clerk and general agent. I wasn’t
+really the least use, for I never did any work. James was for ever
+complaining, but I’m bound to say he stuck to me. I’ll give you a letter
+to him, and I dare say you may get the job that I’ve chucked. It’s not
+much of a thing, but it may suit you for a while. Sit down till I write
+my letter.’
+
+Hyacinth obeyed. Since his anger evaporated a sort of numbness had crept
+over his mind. He scarcely understood what was said to him. He had a
+vague feeling of gratitude towards Captain Quinn, and at the same time
+a great desire to get away and be alone. He felt that he required to
+adjust his mind to the new thoughts which had been crowded into it. When
+he received the letter he put it into his pocket, and rose again to go.
+The Captain saw him to the door.
+
+‘Good-bye.’ Hyacinth heard him, but his voice seemed far off, and his
+words meaningless. ‘Take my advice and run down to Ballymoy at once.
+Don’t hang about Finola any more. She’s a splendid woman, but she’s not
+for you. If you married her you’d be perfectly miserable. Not that I
+think she’d ever marry you. Still, she might. Women do such odd things.
+If by any chance she does, you’ll have to be very careful. Give her her
+head, and take her easy up to the jumps. Don’t try to hustle her, and
+for God’s sake don’t begin sawing at her mouth. I’d very much like to be
+here to see you in the character of Mr. Augusta Goold.’ He sighed.
+‘But, of course, I can’t. The British Isles will be too hot for me for
+a while. However, who can tell what might happen if I win a good medal
+from old Kruger, and capture a few British Generals? I might act best
+man for you yet, if you’ll wait a year or two.’
+
+When Hyacinth got home to his lodgings the first object that met his eye
+was Grealy’s ancient rifle. He tied a label round its barrel addressed
+to the owner. Then he packed his few belongings carefully and strapped
+his bag. So far he was sure of himself. He had no doubt whatever that he
+must leave Dublin at once. He felt that he could not endure an interview
+with Augusta Goold. She might blame him or might pity him. Either would
+be intolerable. She might even justify herself to him, might beat him
+into submission by sheer force of her beauty and her passion, as she had
+done once before. He would run no such risk. He felt that he could not
+sacrifice his sense of right and wrong, could not allow himself to be
+dragged into the moral chaos in which, it seemed to him now, Miss Goold
+lived. He was unconscious of any Divine leading, or even of any direct
+reliance on the obligations of honour. He could not himself have told
+why he clung with such desperate terror to his plan of escaping from his
+surroundings. Simply he could not do certain things or associate as a
+friend with people who did them. To get away from Dublin was the first
+necessity. For a moment it occurred to him that he might go to Dr.
+Henry, tell him the whole story, and ask for advice and help. But that
+was impossible. How could he confess the degradation of his ideal?
+How could he resist the inevitable reminder that he had been warned
+beforehand? Besides, not even now, after all that he had seen, could he
+accept Dr. Henry’s point of view. He still believed in Ireland, still
+hoped to serve her, still looked for the coming of his father’s captain
+to lead the saints to the final victory. Miss Goold had failed him, but
+he was not yet ready to enrol himself a citizen of England.
+
+No, he must leave Dublin. But where to go? His lamp burnt dim and
+expired as he sat thinking. His fire had long ago gone out. He shivered
+with cold and misery, while the faint light of the dawn stole into his
+room. He heard the first twitter of the birds in the convent garden
+behind his lodging. Then came the noise of the earliest traffic, the
+unnaturally loud rattle of the dust-carts on their rounds. A steamer
+hooted far away down the river, and an early bell rang the neighbouring
+nuns to prayer. Hyacinth grew desperate. Could he go home, back to the
+fishing-boats and simple people of Carrowkeel? A great desire for the
+old scenes seized upon him. He fought against it with all his might. He
+had rejected the offer of the home life once. Now, no doubt, it would be
+closed against him. The boat that might have been his was sold long ago.
+He would not go back to confess himself a fool and a failure.
+
+Gradually his mind worked back over the conversation in the hotel with
+Captain Quinn. The recollection of the latter part of it, which had
+meant nothing at the time, grew clear. He felt for the letter in his
+pocket, and drew it out. After all, why should he not offer himself to
+James Quinn? Ballymoy was remote enough to be a hiding-place. It was in
+County Mayo, the Captain had said. He had never heard of the place, and
+it seemed likely that no one else, except its inhabitants, knew of it
+either. At least, there was no reason that he could see why he should
+not go there. His brain refused to work any longer, either at planning
+or remembering. His lips formed the word Ballymoy. He repeated it again
+and again. He seemed to go on repeating it in the troubled sleep which
+came to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+The Irish get credit, even from their enemies, for being a quick-witted,
+imaginative, and artistic people, yet they display astonishingly little
+taste or originality in their domestic architecture. In Connaught, where
+the Celtic genius may be supposed to have the freest opportunity
+for expressing itself, the towns are all exactly alike, and their
+resemblance consists in the absence of any beauty which can please
+the eye. An English country town, although the English bucolic is
+notoriously as stupid as an ox, has certain features of its own. So has
+a Swiss cottage or a French village. It is possible to represent these
+upon Christmas cards or the lids of chocolate-boxes without labelling
+them English, Swiss, or French. Any moderately well educated young lady
+will recognise them at once, and exclaim without hesitation, ‘How truly
+English!’ or ‘How sweetly Swiss!’ But no one can depict an Irish town
+with any hope of having it recognised unless he idealizes boldly,
+introducing a highly-intelligent pig, or a man in knee-breeches kissing
+a fancifully-attired colleen. And then, after all, he might as well have
+labelled it Irish at once in good plain print, and saved himself the
+trouble of drawing the symbolic figures.
+
+To describe Ballymoy, therefore, mountains, rivers, and such like
+natural eccentricities being left out of the count, is to describe fifty
+other West of Ireland towns. There is a railway-station, bleak, gray,
+and windswept, situated, for the benefit of local car-owners, a mile and
+a half from the town, and the road which connects the two is execrable.
+There is a workhouse, in Ballymoy as everywhere else in this lost land
+the most prominent building. There is a convent, immense and wonderfully
+white, with rows and rows of staring windows and a far-seen figure of
+the Blessed Virgin, poised in a niche above the main door. There is
+a Roman Catholic church, gray-walled, gray-roofed, and unspeakably
+hideous, but large and, like the workhouse and the convent, obtruding
+itself upon the eye. It seems as if the inhabitants of the town must all
+of them be forced, and that at no distant date, either into religion
+or pauperism, just as small bodies floating in a pond are sucked into
+connection with one or other of the logs which lie among them. The shops
+in the one tortuous street block the footpaths in front of their doors
+with piles of empty packing-cases. The passenger is saluted, here by a
+buffet in the face from a waterproof coat suspended outside a draper’s,
+there by a hot breath of whisky-laden air. Two shops out of every
+three are public-houses. These occupy a very beautiful position in the
+economic life of the town. Their profits go to build the church, to
+pay the priests, and to fill the coffers of the nuns. The making of
+the profits fills the workhouse. A little aloof stands the Protestant
+church, austere to look upon, expressing in all its lines a grim
+reproach of the people’s life. Beyond it, among scanty, stooped trees,
+is the rectory, gray, as everything else is, wearing, like a decayed
+lady, the air of having lived through better days.
+
+Such, save for one feature, is Ballymoy, as the traveller sees it, as
+Hyacinth Conneally saw it when he arrived there one gusty afternoon.
+The one unusual feature is Mr. James Quinn’s woollen mill. It stands,
+a gaunt and indeed somewhat dilapidated building, at the bottom of the
+street, in the angle where the river turns sharply to flow under the
+bridge. The water just above the bridge is swept into a channel and
+forced to turn the wheel which works some primitive machinery within.
+In the centre of the mill’s front is an archway through which carts pass
+into the paved square behind. Here is the weighbridge, and here great
+bundles of heavy-smelling fleeces are unloaded. Off the square is the
+office where Mr. Quinn sits, pays for the wool, and enters the weight
+of it in damp ledgers. Here on Saturdays two or three men and a score of
+girls receive their wages. The business is a peculiar one. You may bring
+your wool to Mr. Quinn in fleeces, just as you sheer it off the sheep’s
+back. He will pay you for it, more or less, according to the amount
+of trouble you have taken with your sheep. This is the way the younger
+generation likes to treat its wool. If you are older, and are blessed
+with a wife able to card and spin, you deal differently with Mr. Quinn.
+For many evenings after the shearing your wife sits by the fireside
+with two carding-combs in her hands, and wipes off them wonderfully soft
+rolls of wool. Afterwards she fetches the great wheel from its nook, and
+you watch her pulling out an endless gray thread while she steps back
+and forwards across the floor. The girls watch her, too, but not, as
+you do, with sleepy admiration. Their emotion is amused contempt.
+Nevertheless, your kitchen wall is gradually decorated with bunches of
+great gray balls. When these have accumulated sufficiently, you take
+them to Mr. Quinn. A certain number of them become his property. Out of
+the rest he will weave what you like--coarse yellow flannel, good for
+bawneens, and, when it is dyed crimson, for petticoats; or blankets--not
+fluffy like the blankets that are bought in shops, but warm to sleep
+under when the winter comes; or perhaps frieze, very thick and rough,
+the one fabric that will resist the winter rain.
+
+This portion of his business Mr. Quinn finds to be decreasing year by
+year. Fewer and fewer women care to card and spin the wool. The younger
+men find it more profitable to sell it at once, and to wear, instead
+of the old bawneens, shirts called flannel which are brought over from
+cotton-spinning Lancashire, and sold in the shops. The younger women
+think that they look prettier in gowns made artfully by the local
+dressmaker out of feeble materials got up to catch the eye. If now and
+then, for the sake of real warmth, one of them makes a petticoat of the
+old crimson flannel, it is kept so short that, save in very heavy rain,
+it can be concealed. Unfortunately, while these old-fashioned profits
+are vanishing, Mr. Quinn finds it very hard to increase the other branch
+of his business. The fabrics which he makes are good, so good that he
+finds it difficult to sell them in the teeth of competition. The
+country shops are flooded with what he calls ‘shoddy.’ An army of eager
+commercial travellers pushes showy goods on the shopkeepers and the
+public at half his price. Even the farmers in remote districts are
+beginning to acquire a taste for smartness. Some things in which he used
+to do a useful trade are now scarcely worth making. There is hardly
+any demand for the checked head-kerchiefs. The women prefer hats and
+bonnets, decked with cheap ribbons or artificial flowers; and these
+bring no trade to Mr. Quinn’s mill. Still, he manages to hold on. The
+Lancashire people, though they have invented flannelette, cannot as yet
+make a passable imitation of frieze, and there is a Dublin house which
+buys annually all the blankets he can turn out. It is true that even
+there, and for the best class of customers, prices have to be cut so as
+to leave a bare margin of profit. Yet since there is a margin, Mr. Quinn
+holds on, though not very hopefully.
+
+Hyacinth left the bulk of his luggage--a packing-case containing the
+books which the auctioneer had failed to dispose of in Carrowkeel--at
+the station, and walked into Ballymoy carrying his bag. He had little
+difficulty in making his way to the mill, and found the owner of it in
+his office. It was difficult at first to believe that James Quinn could
+be any relation to Captain Albert, the traveller, horse-dealer, soldier,
+and thief. This man was tall, though he stooped when he stood to receive
+his visitor. His movements were slow. His fair hair lay thin across his
+forehead, and was touched above the ears with gray. His blue eyes were
+very gentle, and had a way of looking long and steadily at what they
+saw. A glance at his face left the impression that life, perhaps by no
+very gentle means, had taught him patience.
+
+‘This letter will introduce me,’ said Hyacinth; ‘it is from your
+brother, Captain, or Mr. Albert, Quinn.’
+
+James Quinn took the letter, and turned it over slowly. Then, without
+opening it, he laid it on the table in front of him. His eyes travelled
+from it to Hyacinth’s face, and rested there. It was some time before he
+spoke, and then it was to correct Hyacinth upon a trivial point.
+
+‘My half-brother,’ he said. ‘My father married twice, and Albert is the
+son of his second wife. You may have noticed that he is a great deal
+younger than I am.’
+
+‘He looks younger, certainly,’ said Hyacinth, for the other was waiting
+for a reply.
+
+‘Nearly twenty years younger. Albert is only just thirty.’
+
+The exact age of the Captain was uninteresting and seemed to be beside
+the purpose of the visit. Hyacinth shifted his chair and fidgeted,
+uncertain what to do or say next.
+
+‘Albert gave you this letter to me. Is he a friend of yours?’
+
+‘No.’
+
+James Quinn looked at him again steadily. It seemed--but this may have
+been fancy--that there was a kindlier expression in his eyes after the
+emphatic repudiation of friendship with Albert. At length he took up the
+letter, and read it through slowly.
+
+‘Why did my brother give you this letter?’
+
+The question was a puzzling one. Hyacinth had never thought of trying
+to understand the Captain’s motives. Then the conversation in the hotel
+recurred to him.
+
+‘He said that he wanted to do a good turn to me and to you also.’
+
+‘What had you done for him?’
+
+‘Nothing whatever.’
+
+Apparently James Quinn was not in the least vexed at the brevity of
+the answers he received, or disturbed because his cross-examination was
+obviously disagreeable to Hyacinth.
+
+‘In this letter,’ he went on, referring to the document as he spoke,
+‘he describes you as a young man who is “certainly honest, probably
+religious, and possibly intelligent.” I presume you know my brother, and
+if you do, you may be surprised to hear that I am quite prepared to take
+his word for all this. I have very seldom known Albert to tell me lies,
+and I don’t know why he should want to deceive me in this case. Still,
+I am a little puzzled to account for his giving you the letter. Can you
+add nothing in the way of explanation to what you have said?’
+
+‘I don’t know that I can,’ said Hyacinth.
+
+‘Will you tell me how you met my brother, and what he is doing now, or
+where he is?’
+
+‘I do not think I should be justified in doing so.’
+
+‘Ah, well! I can understand that in certain circumstances Albert would
+be very grateful to a man who would hold his tongue. He might be quite
+willing to do you a good turn if you undertook to answer no questions
+about him.’
+
+He smiled as he spoke, a little grimly, but there was laughter lurking
+in the corners of his eyes. A Puritan will sometimes smile in such a
+way at the thought of a sinful situation, too solemn to be laughed
+at openly, but appealing to a not entirely atrophied sense of humour.
+Hyacinth felt reassured.
+
+‘Indeed,’ he said, ‘I made no promise of silence. It is only that--well,
+I don’t think----’
+
+James Quinn waited patiently for the conclusion of the sentence, but
+Hyacinth never arrived at it.
+
+‘In this letter,’ he said at last, ‘my brother asks me to give you the
+place he lately held in my business. Now, I don’t want to press you to
+say anything you don’t want to, but before we go further I must ask you
+this, Were you implicated in the affair yourself?’
+
+‘I beg your pardon. I don’t quite understand what you mean.’
+
+‘Well, I suppose that since my brother is anxious that you should hold
+your tongue, he has done something that won’t bear talking about. Were
+you implicated in--in whatever the trouble was?’
+
+‘Certainly not,’ said Hyacinth. ‘In fact, it was on account of what you
+speak of as “trouble” that I declined to have anything more to do with
+your brother.’
+
+‘That is probably very much to your credit, and, in the light of my
+brother’s estimate of your character, I may say that I entirely believe
+what you say. Am I to understand that you are an applicant for the post
+in my business which Albert held, and which this letter tells me I may
+consider vacant?’
+
+‘That is what brought me down here,’ said Hyacinth.
+
+‘Have you any other recommendations or testimonials as to character to
+show me?’
+
+‘No. But there are several people who would answer questions about me if
+you wrote to them: Dr. Henry, of Trinity College, would, or Miss Augusta
+Goold, or Father Moran, of Carrowkeel, in County Galway.’
+
+‘You have given me the most remarkable list of references I ever came
+across in my life. I don’t suppose anyone ever before was recommended
+for a post by a Protestant divinity professor, a notoriously violent
+political agitator, a Roman Catholic priest, and a--well, we won’t
+describe my brother. How do you come to be mixed up with all these
+people? Who are you?’
+
+‘I am the son of Æneas Conneally, Rector of Carrowkeel, who died last
+Christmas.’
+
+‘Well,’ said James Quinn, ‘I suppose if all these people are prepared
+to recommend you, your character must be all right. Now, tell me, do you
+know what the post is you are applying for?’
+
+‘No,’ said Hyacinth. ‘And I may as well say that I have had no
+experience or business training whatever.’
+
+‘So I should suppose from the way you have come to me. Well, my brother
+was clerk and traveller for my business. He was supposed to help me to
+keep accounts and to push the sale of my goods among the shopkeepers
+in Connaught. As a matter of fact, he never did either the one or the
+other. When he was at home he did nothing. When he was on the road
+he bought and sold horses. I paid him eighty pounds a year and his
+travelling expenses. I also promised him a percentage on the profits of
+the sales he effected. Now, do you think this work would suit you?’
+
+‘I might not be able to do it,’ said Hyacinth, ‘but I should very much
+like to be allowed to try. I can understand that I shall be very little
+use at first, and I am willing to work without any salary for a time,
+perhaps six months, until I have learned something about your business.’
+
+‘Come, now, that’s a business-like offer. I’ll give you a trial, if it
+was only for the sake of your list of references. I won’t keep you six
+months without paying you if you turn out to be any good at all. And I
+think there must be something in you, for you’ve gone about getting this
+job in the queerest way I ever heard of. Would you like any time to make
+up your mind finally before accepting the post?’
+
+‘No,’ said Hyacinth; ‘I accept at once.’
+
+They walked together through the mill, and looked at the machines and
+the workers. The girls smiled when Mr. Quinn stopped to speak to them,
+and looked with frank curiosity at Hyacinth. The three or four men who
+did the heavier work stopped and chatted for a few minutes when they
+came to them. Evidently there was no soreness or distrust here between
+the employer and the employed. When they had gone through the rooms
+where the work was going on, they climbed a staircase like a ladder, and
+came to the loft where the wool was stored. Hyacinth handled it as he
+was directed, and endeavoured to appreciate the difference between the
+good and the inferior qualities. They passed by an unglazed window at
+the back of the mill, and Mr. Quinn pointed out his own house. It stood
+among trees and shrubs, now for the most part bare, but giving promise
+of shady privacy in summertime. Long windows opened out on to a lawn
+stretching down to the watercourse which fed the millwheel. A gravel
+path skirted one side of the house leading to a bridge, and thence to
+a doorway in a high wall, beyond which lay the road. As they looked
+the door opened, and a woman with two little girls came through. They
+crossed the bridge, and walked up to the house.
+
+‘That is my wife,’ said Mr. Quinn, ‘and my two little girls.’
+
+He stretched out between the bars of the window, and shouted to them.
+All three looked back. Mrs. Quinn waved her hand, and the two children
+shouted in reply. Then a light appeared in one of the windows, and
+Hyacinth caught a glimpse of a trim maid-servant pulling the curtains
+across it.
+
+‘We shall be having tea at half-past six,’ said Mr. Quinn. ‘Will you
+come and join us? By the way, where are you staying?’
+
+Hyacinth accepted the invitation, and confessed that he had not as yet
+looked for any place to lay his head.
+
+‘Ah! Better go to the hotel for to-night. It’s not much of a place,
+but you will have to learn to put up with that sort of accommodation.
+Tomorrow we’ll try and find you some decent lodgings.’
+
+The hotel struck even Hyacinth as of inferior quality, though it
+boasted great things in the timetable advertisements, and called itself
+‘Imperial’ in large gold letters above its door. A smell of whisky and
+tobacco greeted him as he entered, and a waiter with a greasy coat, in
+answer to inquiries about a bed, sent him down a dark passage to seek
+a lady called Miss Sweeney at the bar. Large leather cases with broad
+straps and waterproof-covered baskets blocked the passage, and Hyacinth
+stumbled among them for some time before he discovered Miss Sweeney
+reading a periodical called _Spicy Bits_ among her whisky-bottles.
+She was a young woman of would-be fashionable appearance, and acted
+apparently in the double capacity of barmaid and clerk. On hearing that
+Hyacinth required, not whisky, but a bedroom, she requested him to go
+forward to the office, indicating a glass case at the far end of the bar
+counter. Here he repeated his request to her through a small opening in
+the glass, and received her assurance, given with great condescension,
+that No. 42 was vacant, and, further, that there was a fire in the
+commercial room. A boy whom she summoned carried Hyacinth’s bag to an
+extremely dirty and ill-furnished bedroom, and afterwards conducted
+him to the promised fire. Two other guests were seated at it when he
+entered, who, after a long stare, made room for him. Apparently there
+was no one else stopping in the hotel, and the whole mass of cumbrous
+baggage which blocked the passage to the bar must belong to them.
+Hyacinth realized, with a feeling of disgust which he could
+not account for, that these were two members of his new
+profession--fellow-travellers in the voyages of commerce. He
+gathered--for they talked loudly, without regarding his presence--that
+they represented two Manchester firms which were rivals in the wholesale
+drapery business. Very much of what they said was unintelligible to him,
+though the words were familiar. He knew that ‘lines’ could be ‘quoted,’
+but not apparently in the same sense in which they discussed these
+operations, and it puzzled him to hear of muslins being ‘done at one and
+seven-eighths.’ He sat for a time wondering at the waste of money and
+energy involved in sending these men to remote corners of Ireland to
+search for customers. Then he left them, and made his way down the muddy
+street to Mr. Quinn’s house.
+
+The room into which he was shown was different from any he had ever
+seen. It was lit by a single lamp with a dull glass globe and a turf
+fire which burnt brightly. Two straight-backed, leather-covered chairs
+stood one on either side of the tiled hearth. Near one stood a little
+table covered with neatly-arranged books, and, rising from among them,
+a reading-lamp, as yet unlit. Beyond the other was a work-table
+strewed with reels and scissors, on which lay a child’s frock and some
+stockings. The table was laid for tea. On it were plates piled up with
+floury scones, delicate beleek saucers full of butter patted thin into
+the shapes of shells, and jam in coloured glass dishes cased in silver
+filigree. A large home-baked loaf of soda bread on a wooden platter
+stood at one end of the table, and near it a sponge-cake. At the other
+end was an array of cups and saucers with silver spoons that glittered,
+a jug of cream, and one of milk. Two of the cups were larger than the
+others, and had those curious bars across them which are designed to
+save men from wetting their moustaches when they drink. No room and no
+preparation for a meal could have offered a more striking contrast to
+Augusta Goold’s dining-room, her groups of wineglasses, multiplicity of
+heavy-handled knives and forks, and her candles shrouded in silk. Nor
+was the dainty neatness less remote from the cracked delf and huddled
+sordidness of his old home.
+
+Long before Hyacinth had realized an impression of the scene before him
+Mrs. Quinn greeted him, and led him to the fire. Her two little girls,
+who lay on the hearthrug with a picture-book between them, were bidden
+to make room for him. When her husband appeared she bustled off, and in
+a minute or two she and the maid came in bringing toast and tea and hot
+water hissing in a silver urn.
+
+As the evening passed Hyacinth began to realize that he had entered into
+a home of peace. He felt that these people were neither greatly anxious
+to be rich nor much afraid of being poor. They seemed in no way fretted
+that there were others higher in the social scale, cleverer or more
+brilliant than they were. He understood that they were both of them
+religious in a way quite different from any he had known. They neither
+spoke of mysteries, like his father, nor were eager about disputings,
+like the men who had been his fellow-students. They were living a very
+simple life, of which faith and a wide charity formed a part as natural
+as eating or sleeping. When the children’s bedtime came it seemed to
+him a very wonderful thing that they should kneel in turns beside their
+father’s knee and say their prayers aloud, when he, a stranger, was in
+the room. It seemed to him less strange, because then he had been two
+hours longer in the company of the Quinns, that before leaving he,
+too, should kneel beside his hostess and listen while his new employer
+repeated the familiar words of some of the old collects he had heard his
+father read in church.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+On Sunday, the third day after his arrival in Ballymoy, Hyacinth went to
+church. He could hardly have avoided doing so, even if he had wanted to,
+for Mrs. Quinn invited him to share her pew. There was no real necessity
+for such hospitality, for the church was never, even under the most
+favourable circumstances, more than half full. The four front seats were
+reserved for a Mr. Stack, on whose property the town of Ballymoy stood.
+But this gentleman preferred to live in Surrey, and even when he came
+over to Ireland for the shooting rarely honoured the church with his
+presence. A stone tablet, bearing the name of this magnate’s father, a
+Cork pawnbroker, who had purchased the property for a small sum under
+the Encumbered Estates Court Act, adorned the wall beside the pulpit.
+The management of the property was in the hands of a Dublin firm, so
+the parish was deprived of the privilege of a resident land agent. The
+doctor, recently appointed to the district, was a Roman Catholic of
+plebeian antecedents, which reduced the resident gentry of Ballymoy
+to the Quinns, a bank manager, and the Rector, Canon Beecher. A few
+farmers, Mr. Stack’s gamekeeper, and the landlady of the Imperial Hotel,
+made up the rest of the congregation.
+
+The service was not of a very attractive or inspiriting kind. Canon
+Beecher--his title was a purely honorary one, not even involving the
+duty of preaching in the unpretending building which, in virtue of
+some forgotten history, was dignified with the name of Killinacoff
+Cathedral--read slowly with somewhat ponderous emphasis. His thirty
+years in Holy Orders had slightly hardened an originally luscious Dublin
+brogue, but there remained a certain gentle aspiration of the _d’s_ and
+_t’s_, and a tendency to omit the labial consonants altogether. He read
+an immense number of prayers, gathering, as it seemed to Hyacinth, the
+longest ones from the four corners of the Prayer-Book. At intervals he
+allowed himself to be interrupted with a hymn, but resumed afterwards
+the steady flow of supplication. The eldest Miss Beecher--the Canon had
+altogether two daughters and three sons--played a harmonium. The other
+girl and the three boys, with the assistance of an uncertain bass from
+Mr. Quinn, gave utterance to the congregation’s praise. Hyacinth tried
+to join in the first hymn, which happened to be familiar to him, but
+quavered into silence towards the end of the second verse, discovering
+that the eyes of Mrs. Beecher from her pew, of the Canon from the
+reading-desk, of the vocal Miss Beecher and her brothers, were fixed
+upon him. The sermon proved to be long and uninteresting. It was about
+Melchizedek, and was so far appropriate to the Priest and King that it
+had no recognisable beginning and need not apparently have ever had an
+end. Perhaps no one, unless he were specially trained for the purpose,
+could have followed right through the quiet meanderings of the Canon’s
+thought. This kind of sermon, however, has the one advantage that
+the listener can take it up and drop it again at any point without
+inconvenience, and Hyacinth was able to give his attention to some
+sections of it. There was no attempt at eloquence or any kind of
+learning displayed, but he understood, as he listened, where the Quinns
+got their religion, or at least how their religion was kept alive.
+Certain very simple things were reiterated with a quiet earnestness
+which left no doubt that the preacher believed exactly what he said, and
+lived by the light of his faith.
+
+One evening shortly afterwards Canon Beecher called upon Hyacinth. The
+conversation during the visit resolved itself into a kind of catechism,
+which, curiously enough, was quite inoffensive. The Canon learnt by
+degrees something of Hyacinth’s past life, and his career in Trinity
+College. He shook his head gravely over the friendship with Augusta
+Goold, whom he evidently regarded as almost beyond the reach of the
+grace of God. Hyacinth was forced to admit, with an increasing sense of
+shame, that he had never signed a temperance pledge, did not read the
+organ of the Church Missionary Society, was not a member of a Young
+Men’s Christian Association, or even of a Gleaners’ Union. He felt, as
+he made each confession sorrowfully, that he was losing all hope of the
+Canon’s friendship, and was most agreeably surprised when the interview
+closed with a warm invitation to a mid-day dinner at the Rectory on the
+following Sunday. Mrs. Quinn, who took a sort of elder sister’s interest
+in his goings out and comings in, was delighted when she heard that he
+was going to the Rectory, and assured him that he would like both Mrs.
+Beecher and the girls. She confided afterwards to her husband that the
+influence of a Christian home was likely to be most beneficial to the
+‘poor boy.’
+
+The Rectory displayed none of the signs of easy comfort which had
+charmed Hyacinth in the Quinns’ house. The floor of the square hall was
+covered with a cheap, well-worn oilcloth. Its walls were damp-stained,
+and the only furniture consisted of a wooden chair and a somewhat
+rickety table. In the middle of the wall hung a large olive-green card
+with silver lettering. ‘Christ is the unseen Guest in this house,’
+Hyacinth read, ‘the Sharer in every pleasure, the Listener to every
+conversation.’ A fortnight before, he would have turned with disgust
+from such an advertisement, but now, since he had known the Quinns
+and listened to the Canon’s wandering sermons, he looked at it with
+different eyes. He felt that the words might actually express a fact,
+and that a family might live together as if they believed them to be
+true.
+
+‘Yes,’ said the Canon, who had come in with him, and saw him gaze at it,
+‘these motto-cards are very nice. I bought several of them last time I
+was in Dublin, and I think I have a spare one left which I can give
+you if you like. It has silver letters like that one, but printed on a
+crimson ground.’
+
+Evidently the design and the colouring were what struck him as
+noticeable. The motto itself was a commonplace of Christian living, the
+expression of a basal fact, quite naturally hung where it would catch
+the eye of chance visitors.
+
+In the drawing-room Mrs. Beecher and her two daughters, still in their
+hats and gloves, stood round a turf fire. They made a place at once for
+Hyacinth, and one of the girls drew forward a rickety basket-work chair,
+covered with faded cretonne. He was formally introduced to them. Miss
+Beecher and Miss Elsie Beecher had both, the latter very recently,
+reached the dignity of young womanhood, and wore long dresses. The three
+boys, who were younger, were made known afterwards.
+
+When they went into the dining-room the Canon selected the soundest of
+a miscellaneous collection of chairs for Hyacinth, and seated him beside
+Mrs. Beecher. Then the elder girl--Miss Beecher’s name, he learnt, was
+Marion--entered in a long apron carrying a boiled leg of mutton followed
+by her sister with dishes of potatoes and mashed parsnips.
+
+‘You see,’ said Mrs. Beecher, and there was no note of apology in her
+voice as she made the explanation, ‘my girls are accustomed to do a good
+deal of the house-work. We have only one servant, and she is not very
+presentable when she has just cooked the dinner.’
+
+Hyacinth glanced at Marion Beecher, who smiled at him with frank
+friendliness, as she took her seat beside her father. He saw suddenly
+that the girl was beautiful. He had not noticed this in church. There he
+had no opportunity of observing the subtle grace with which she
+moved, and the half-light left unrevealed the lustrous purity of her
+complexion, the radiant red and white which only the warm damp of the
+western seaboard can give or preserve. Her eyes he had seen even in the
+church, but now first he realized what unfathomable gentleness and what
+a wonder of frank innocence were in them. The Canon looked round the
+table at his children, and there was a humorous twinkle in his eye when
+he turned to Hyacinth and quoted:
+
+‘“Your sons shall grow up as young plants, and your daughters shall be
+as the polished corners of the temple.”’
+
+Perhaps nine-tenths of civilized mankind would regard five children as
+five misfortunes under any circumstances, as quite overwhelming when
+they have been showered on a man with a very small income, who is
+obliged to live in a remote corner of Ireland. Apparently the Canon
+did not look upon himself as an afflicted man at all. There was
+an unmistakable sincerity about the way in which he completed his
+quotation:
+
+‘“Lo! thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the Lord.”’
+
+It dawned on Hyacinth that quite possibly the Canon’s view of the
+situation might be the right one. It was certainly wonderfully pleasant
+to see the girls move through the room, and it seemed to him that they
+actually realized the almost forgotten ideal of serviceable womanhood.
+The talk at dinner turned first on the ailments of an old woman who was
+accustomed to clean the church, but was now suspected of being past
+her work; then, by an abrupt transition, on the new hat which the
+bank-manager’s wife had brought home from Dublin; and, finally, the
+connection of thought being again far from obvious, on the hymns which
+had been sung that morning. It was at this point that Hyacinth was
+included in the conversation. Marion Beecher announced that one of the
+hymns was a special favourite of hers, because she remembered her mother
+singing the younger children to sleep with it when they were babies. She
+caught Hyacinth looking at her while she spoke, and said to him:
+
+‘Do you sing, Mr. Conneally?’
+
+‘I do a little.’
+
+‘Oh, then you must come and help us in the choir.’ ‘Choir’ seemed a
+grandiose name for the four Beechers and Mr. Quinn, but Marion, who had
+little experience of anything better, had no misgivings. ‘I hope you
+sing tenor. I always long to have a tenor in my choir. Why, we might
+have one of Barnby’s anthems at Easter, and we haven’t been able to sing
+one since Mr. Nash left the bank.’
+
+Hyacinth had never sung a part in his life, and could not read music,
+but he grew bold, and, professing to have an excellent ear, said he
+was willing to learn. The prospect of a long series of choir practices
+conducted by Marion Beecher seemed to him just then an extremely
+pleasant one.
+
+After dinner, while the two girls cleared away the plates and dishes,
+Canon Beecher invited Hyacinth to smoke.
+
+‘I never learnt the habit myself,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t so much the
+fashion in my young days as it is now, but I have no objection whatever
+to the smell.’
+
+Hyacinth lit a cigarette apologetically. It seemed to him almost a
+wicked thing to do, but his host evidently wished him to be comfortable.
+Their talk after the girls had left the room turned on politics.
+Hyacinth’s confession of his friendship with Augusta Goold had impressed
+the Canon, and he delivered himself of a very kindly little lecture on
+the duty of loyalty and the sinfulness of contention with the powers
+that be. His way of putting the matter neither irritated Hyacinth, like
+the flamboyant Imperialism of the Trinity students, nor drove him into
+self-assertion, like Dr. Henry’s contemptuous reasonableness. Still, he
+felt bound to make some sort of defence of the opinions which were still
+his own.
+
+‘Surely,’ he said, ‘there must be some limit to the duty of loyalty. If
+a Government has no constitutional right to rule, is a man bound to be
+loyal to it?’
+
+‘I think,’ said the Canon, ‘that the question is decided for us. Is it
+not, Mr. Conneally? “Render unto Caesar”--you remember the verse. Even if
+the Government were as unconstitutional as you appear to think, it would
+not be more so than the Roman Government of Judaea when these words were
+spoken.’
+
+Hyacinth pondered this answer. It opened up to him an entirely new way
+of looking at the subject, and he could see that it might be necessary
+for a Christian to acquiesce without an attempt at resistance in any
+Government which happened to exist.
+
+He remembered other verses in the New Testament which could be quoted
+even more conclusively in favour of this passive obedience. Yet he felt
+that there must be a fallacy lurking somewhere. It was, on the face of
+it, an obvious absurdity to think that a man, because he happened to
+be a Christian, was therefore bound to submit to any form of tyranny or
+oppression.
+
+‘Suppose,’ he said--‘I only say suppose--that a Government did immoral
+things, that it robbed or allowed evil-disposed people to rob, would it
+still be right to be loyal?’
+
+‘I think so,’ said the Canon quietly.
+
+Hyacinth looked at him in astonishment.
+
+‘Do you mean to say that you yourself would be loyal under such
+circumstances?’
+
+‘I prefer not to discuss the question in that personal way, but the
+Church to which you and I belong is loyal still, although the Government
+has robbed us of our property and our position, and although it is now
+allowing our people to be robbed still further.’
+
+‘You mean by the Disestablishment and the Land Acts?’
+
+‘Yes. I think it is our great glory that our loyalty is imperishable,
+that it survives even such treatment as we have received and are
+receiving.’
+
+‘That is very beautiful,’ said Hyacinth slowly. ‘I see that there is a
+great nobility in such loyalty, although I do not even wish to share it
+myself. You see, I am an Irishman, and I want to see my country great
+and free.’
+
+‘I suppose,’ said the Canon, ‘that it is very natural that we should
+love the spot on earth in which we live. I think that I love Ireland
+too. But we must remember that our citizenship is in heaven, and it
+seems to me that any departure from the laws of the King of that country
+dishonours us, and even dishonours the earthly country which we call our
+own.’
+
+Hyacinth said nothing. There flashed across him a recollection of
+Augusta Goold’s hope that some final insult would one day goad the
+Irish Protestants into disloyalty. Clearly, if Canon Beecher was to be
+regarded as a type, she had no conception of the religious spirit of the
+Church of Ireland. But was there anyone else like this clergyman? He did
+not know, but he guessed that his friends the Quinns would think of the
+matter in somewhat the same way. It seemed to him quite possible that in
+scattered and remote parishes this strangely unreasonable conception of
+Christianity might survive. After a pause the Canon went on:
+
+‘You must not think that I do not love Ireland too. I look forward to
+seeing her free some day, but with the freedom of the Gospel. It will
+not be in my time, I know, but surely it will come to pass. Our people
+have still the simple faith of the early ages, and they have many very
+beautiful virtues. They only want the dawn of the Dayspring from on
+high to shine on them, and then Ireland will be once more the Island of
+Saints--_insula sanctorum_.’ He dwelt tenderly on the two words. ‘I do
+not think it will matter much then what earthly Government bears rule
+over us. But come, I see that you have finished your smoke, and I must
+go to my study to think over my sermon.’
+
+When Hyacinth entered the drawing-room the girls surrounded him, asking
+him for answers to a printed list of questions. It appeared that the
+committee of a bazaar for some charity in which it was right to be
+interested had issued a sort of examination-paper, and promised a prize
+to the best answerer. The questions were all of one kind: ‘What is the
+Modern Athens--the Eternal City--the City of the Tribes? Who was the
+Wizard of the North--the Bulwark of the Protestant Faith? The earlier
+names on the list presented little difficulty to Hyacinth. Marion
+took down his answers, whilst Elsie murmured a pleasant chorus of
+astonishment at his cleverness. Suddenly he came to a dead stop. ‘Who
+was the Martyr of Melanesia?’
+
+‘I have never heard of him,’ said Hyacinth.
+
+‘Never heard of the Martyr of Melanesia!’ said Elsie. ‘Why, we knew that
+at once.’
+
+‘Yes,’ said Marion, ‘there was an article on him in last month’s
+_Gleaner_. Surely you read the _Gleaner_, Mr. Conneally?’
+
+Hyacinth felt Marion’s eyes fixed on him with something of a reproach
+in them. He wrestled with a vague recollection of having somewhere
+heard the name of the periodical. For a moment he thought of risking
+cross-questioning, and saying that he had only missed the last number.
+Then he suddenly remembered the card with silver lettering which
+hung above his coat in the hall, and told the truth with even a quite
+unnecessary aggravation.
+
+‘No, I never remember seeing a copy of it in my life. I don’t even know
+what it is about.’
+
+‘Oh!’ said the girls, round-eyed with horror. ‘Just think! And we all
+have collecting-boxes.’
+
+‘It is a missionary periodical,’ said Marion. ‘It has news in it
+from every corner of the mission-field, and every month a list of the
+stations that specially need our prayers.’
+
+Hyacinth left the Rectory that night with three well-read numbers of the
+_Gleaner_ in his pocket.
+
+Afterwards he had many talks with Canon Beecher and the Quinns about
+the work of the missionary societies. He learnt, to his surprise, that
+really immense sums of money were subscribed every year by members of
+the Church of Ireland for the conversion of the heathen in very remote
+parts of the world. It could not be denied that these contributions
+represented genuine self-denial. Young men went without a sufficiency
+of tobacco, and refrained from buying sorely-needed new tennis-racquets.
+Ladies, with the smallest means at their command, reared marketable
+chickens, and sold their own marmalade and cakes. In such ways, and not
+from the superfluity of the rich, many thousands of pounds were gathered
+annually. It was still more wonderful to him to discover that large
+numbers of young men and women, and these the most able and energetic,
+devoted themselves to this foreign service, and that their brothers and
+sisters at home were banded together in unions to watch their doings
+and to pray for them. He found himself entirely untouched by this
+enthusiasm, in spite of the beautiful expression it found in the lives
+of his new friends.
+
+But it astonished him greatly that there should be this potent energy
+in the Irish Church. The utter helplessness of its Bishops and clergy in
+Irish affairs, the total indifference of its people to every effort at
+national regeneration, had led him to believe that the Church itself was
+moribund. Now he discovered that there was in it an amazing vitality,
+a capacity of giving birth to enthusiastic souls. The knowledge brought
+with it first of all a feeling of intense irritation. It seemed to him
+that all religions were in league against Ireland. The Roman Church
+seized the scanty savings of one section of the people, and squandered
+them in buying German glass and Italian marble. Were the Protestants
+any better, when they spent £20,000 a year on Chinamen and negroes? The
+Roman Catholics took the best of their boys and girls to make priests
+and nuns of them. The Protestants were doing the same thing when they
+shipped off their young men and young women to spend their strength
+among savages. Both were robbing Ireland of what Ireland needed
+most--money and vitality. He would not say, even to himself, that all
+this religious enthusiasm was so much ardour wasted. No doubt the Roman
+priest did good work in Chicago, as the Protestant missionary did in
+Uganda; only it seemed to him that of all lands Ireland needed most the
+service and the prayers of those of her children who had the capacity of
+self-forgetfulness. Afterwards, when he thought more deeply, he found a
+great hope in the very existence of all this altruistic enthusiasm. He
+had a vision of all that might be done for Ireland if only the splendid
+energy of her own children could be used in her service. He tried more
+than once to explain his point of view. Mr. Quinn met him with blank
+disbelief in any possible future for Ireland.
+
+‘The country is doomed,’ he said. ‘The people are lazy, thriftless, and
+priest-ridden. The best of them are flying to America, and those that
+remain are dying away, drifting into lunatic asylums, hospitals, and
+workhouses. There is a curse upon us. In another twenty years there
+will be no Irish people--at least, none in Ireland. Then the English and
+Scotch will come and make something of the country.’
+
+From Canon Beecher he met with scarcely more sympathy or understanding.
+
+‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘no doubt we ought to make more efforts than we do
+to convert our fellow-countrymen. But it is very difficult to see how we
+are to go to work. There is one society which exists for this purpose.
+Its friends are full of the very kind of enthusiasm which you describe.
+I could point you out plenty of its agents whose whole souls are
+in their work, but you know as well as I do how completely they are
+failing.’
+
+‘But,’ said Hyacinth, ‘I do not in the least mean that we should start
+more missions to Roman Catholics. It does not seem to me to matter much
+what kind of religion a man professes, and I should be most unwilling to
+uproot anyone’s belief. What we ought to do is throw our whole force and
+energy into the work of regenerating Ireland. It is possible for us to
+do this, and we ought to try.’
+
+‘Well, well,’ said the Canon, ‘I must not let you make me argue with
+you, Conneally; but I hope you won’t preach these doctrines of yours to
+my daughters. I think it is better for them to drop their pennies into
+missionary collecting-boxes, and leave the tangled problems of Irish
+politics to those better able to understand them than we are.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+There are certain professions, in themselves honest, useful, and even
+estimable, for which society has agreed to entertain a feeling of
+contempt. It is, for instance, very difficult to think of a curate
+as anything except a butt for satirists, or to be respectful to the
+profession of tailoring, although many a man for private pecuniary
+reasons is meek before the particular individual who makes his clothes.
+Yet the novelist and the playwright, who hold the mirror up to modern
+humanity, are occasionally kind even to curates and tailors. There is a
+youthful athlete in Holy Orders who thrashes, to our immense admiration,
+the village bully, bewildering his victim and his admirers with his
+mastery of what is described a little vaguely as the ‘old Oxford
+science.’ Once, at least, a glamour of romance has been shed over the
+son of a tailor, and it becomes imaginable that even the chalker of
+unfinished coats may in the future be posed as heroic. There is still,
+however, a profession which no eccentric novelist has ever ventured to
+represent as other than entirely contemptible. The commercial traveller
+is beneath satire, and outside the region of sympathy. If he appears at
+all in fiction or on the stage, he is irredeemably vulgar. He is
+never heroic, never even a villain, rarely comic, always, poor man,
+objectionable. This is a peculiar thing in the literature of a people
+like the English, who are not ashamed to glory in their commercial
+success, and are always ready to cheer a politician who professes to
+have the interests of trade at heart. Amid the current eulogies of
+the working man and the apotheosis of the beings called ‘Captains
+of Industry,’ the bagman surely ought to find at least an apologist.
+Without him it seems likely that many articles would fail to find a
+place in the windows of the provincial shopkeepers. Without him large
+sections of the public would probably remain ignorant for years of new
+brands of cigarettes, and dyspeptic people might never come across the
+foods which Americans prepare for their use.
+
+Also the individual bagman is often not without his charm. He knows, if
+not courts and princes, at least hotels and railway companies. He is on
+terms of easy familiarity with every ‘boots’ in several counties. He can
+calculate to a nicety how long a train is likely to be delayed by a fair
+‘somewhere along the line.’ He is also full of information about local
+politics. In Connaught, for instance, an experienced member of the
+profession will gauge for you the exact strength of the existing League
+in any district. He knows what publicans may be regarded as ‘priest’s
+men,’ and who have leanings towards independence. His knowledge is
+frequently minute, and he can prophesy the result of a District Council
+election by reckoning up the number of leading men who read the _United
+Irishman_, and weighing them against those who delight in the pages of
+the _Leader_. The men who can do these things are themselves local. They
+reside in their district, and, as a rule, push the sales and collect the
+debts of local brewers and flour-merchants. The representatives of the
+larger English firms only make their rounds twice or three times a year,
+and are less interesting. They pay the penalty of being cosmopolitan,
+and tend to become superficial in their judgment of men and things.
+
+Hyacinth, like most members of the public, was ignorant of the greatness
+and interest of his new profession. He entered upon it with some
+misgiving, and viewed his trunk of sample blankets and shawls with
+disgust. Even a new overcoat, though warm and weatherproof, afforded
+him little joy, being itself a sample of Mr. Quinn’s frieze. One thought
+alone cheered him, and even generated a little enthusiasm for his work.
+It occurred to him that in selling the produce of the Ballymoy Mill
+he was advancing the industrial revival of Ireland. He knew that
+other people, quite heroic figures, were working for the same end. A
+Government Board found joyous scope for the energies of its officials in
+giving advice to people who wanted to cure fish or make lace. It earned
+the blessing which is to rest upon those who are reviled and evil spoken
+of, for no one, except literary people, who write for English magazines,
+ever had a good word for it. There were also those--their activity
+took the form of letters to the newspapers--who desired to utilize the
+artistic capacity of the Celt, and to enrich the world with beautiful
+fabrics and carpentry. They, too, were workers in the cause of the
+revival. Then there were great ladies, the very cream of the Anglo-Irish
+aristocracy, who petted tweeds and stockings, and offered magnificent
+prizes to industrious cottagers. They earned quite large sums of
+money for their protégés by holding sales in places like Belfast and
+Manchester, where titles can be judiciously cheapened to a wealthy
+bourgeoisie, and the wives of ship-builders and cotton-spinners will
+spend cheerfully in return for the privilege of shaking hands with
+a Countess. A crowd of minor enthusiasts fostered such industries as
+sprigging, and there was one man who believed that the future prosperity
+of Ireland might be secured by teaching people to make dolls. It was
+altogether a noble army, and even a commercial traveller might hold
+his head high in the world if he counted himself one of its soldiers.
+Hitherto results have not been at all commensurate with the amount of
+printer’s ink expended in magazine articles and advertisements. Yet
+something has been accomplished. Nunneries here and there have been
+induced to accept presents of knitting-machines, and people have
+begun to regard as somehow sacred the words ‘technical education.’
+The National Board of Education has also spent a large sum of money in
+reviving among its teachers the almost forgotten art of making paper
+boats.
+
+Hyacinth very soon discovered that his patriotic view of this work did
+not commend itself to his brother travellers. He found that they had no
+feeling but one of contempt for people whom they regarded as meddling
+amateurs. Occasionally, when some convent, under a bustling Mother
+Superior, advanced from the region of half-charitable sales at
+exhibitions into the competition of the open market, contempt became
+dislike, and wishes were expressed in quite unsuitable language that the
+good ladies would mind their own proper business. Until Hyacinth learnt
+to conceal his hopes of Ireland’s future as a manufacturing country he
+was regarded with suspicion. No one, of course, objected to his making
+what use he could of patriotism as an advertisement, but he was given to
+understand that, like other advertisements, it could not be quoted
+among the initiated without a serious breach of good manners. Even as an
+advertisement it was not rated highly.
+
+There was an elderly gentleman, stout and somewhat bibulous, who
+superintended the consumption of certain brands of American cigarettes
+in the province of Connaught. Hyacinth met him in the exceedingly
+dirty Railway Hotel at Knock. Since there were no other guests, and the
+evening was wet, the two were thrown upon each other’s society in the
+commercial-room.
+
+‘I don’t think,’ said Mr. Hollywell, in reply to a remark of Hyacinth’s,
+‘that there’s the least use trying to drag patriotic sentiment into
+business. Of course, since you represent an Irish house--woollen goods,
+I think you said--you’re quite right to run the fact for all it’s worth.
+I don’t in the least blame you. Only I don’t think you’ll find it pays.’
+
+He sipped his whisky-and-water--it was still early, and he had only
+arrived at his third glass--and then proceeded to give his personal
+experience.
+
+‘Now, I work for an American firm. If there was any force in the
+patriotic idea I shouldn’t sell a single cigarette. My people are in
+the big tobacco combine. You must have read the sort of things the
+newspapers wrote about us when we started. From any point of view,
+British Imperial or Irish National, we should have been boycotted long
+ago if patriotism had anything to do with trade. But look at the facts.
+Our chief rivals in this district are two Irish firms. They advertise
+in Gaelic, which is a mistake to start with, because nobody can read it.
+They get the newspaper people to write articles recommending a “great
+home industry” to public support. They get local branches of all the
+different leagues to pass resolutions pledging their members to smoke
+only Irish tobacco. But until quite lately they simply didn’t have a
+look in.’
+
+‘Why?’ asked Hyacinth. ‘Were your things cheaper or better?’
+
+‘No,’ said the other, ‘I don’t think they were either. You see, prices
+are bound to come out pretty even in the long run, and I should say
+that, if anything, they sold a slightly better article. It’s hard to
+say exactly why we beat them. When competition is really keen a lot of
+little things that you would hardly notice make all the difference.
+For one thing, I get a free hand in the matter of subscribing to local
+bazaars and race-meetings. I’ve often taken as much as a pound’s worth
+of tickets for a five-pound note that some priest was raffling in aid of
+a new chapel. It’s wonderful the orders you can get from shopkeepers in
+that kind of way. Then, we get our things up better. Look at that.’
+
+He handed Hyacinth a highly-glazed packet with a picture of a handsome
+brown dog on it.
+
+‘Keep it,’ said Mr. Hollywell. ‘I give away twenty or thirty of
+those packets every week. Now look inside. What have you? Oh, H.M.S.
+_Majestic_. That’s one of a series of photos of “Britain’s first line
+of defence.” Lots of people go on buying those cigarettes just to get
+a complete collection of the photos. We supply an album to keep them in
+for one and sixpence. There’s another of our makes which has pictures
+of actresses and pretty women. They are extraordinarily popular. They’re
+perfectly all right, of course, from the moral point of view, but one in
+every ten is in tights or sitting with her legs very much crossed, just
+to keep up the expectation. It’s very queer the people who go for those
+photos. You’d expect it to be young men, but it isn’t.’
+
+The subject was not particularly interesting to Hyacinth, but since his
+companion was evidently anxious to go on talking, he asked the expected
+question.
+
+‘Young women,’ said Mr. Hollywell. ‘I found it out quite by accident. I
+got a lot of complaints from one particular town that our cigarettes had
+no photos with them. I discovered after a while that a girl in one
+of the principal shops had hit on a dodge for getting out the photos
+without apparently injuring the packets. The funny thing was that
+she never touched the ironclads or the “Types of the soldiers of all
+nations,” which you might have thought would interest her, but she
+collared every single actress, and had duplicates of most of them. And
+she wasn’t an exception. Most girls goad their young men to buy these
+cigarettes and make collections of the photos. Queer, isn’t it? I can’t
+imagine why they do it.’
+
+‘You said just now,’ said Hyacinth, ‘that latterly you hadn’t done quite
+so well. Did you run out of actresses and battleships?’
+
+‘No; but one of the Irish firms took to offering prizes and enclosing
+coupons. You collected twenty coupons, and you got a silver-backed
+looking-glass--girls again, you see--or two thousand coupons, and you
+got a new bicycle. It’s an old dodge, of course, but somehow it always
+seems to pay. However, all this doesn’t matter to you. All I wanted was
+to show you that there is no use relying on patriotism. The thing to go
+in for in any business is attractive novelties, cheap lines, and, in the
+country shops, long credit.’
+
+It was not very long before Hyacinth began to realize the soundness of
+Mr. Hollywell’s contempt for patriotism. In the town of Clogher he
+found the walls placarded with the advertisements of an ultra-patriotic
+draper. ‘Féach Annseo,’ he read, ‘The Irish House. Support Home
+Manufactures.’ Another placard was even more vehement in its appeal.
+‘Why curse England,’ it asked, ‘and support her manufacturers?’ Try
+O’Reilly, the one-price man.’ The sentiments were so admirable that
+Hyacinth followed the advice and tried O’Reilly.
+
+The shop was crowded when he entered, for it was market day in Clogher.
+The Irish country-people, whose manners otherwise are the best in
+the world, have one really objectionable habit. In the street or in a
+crowded building they push their way to the spot they want to reach,
+without the smallest regard for the feelings of anyone who happens to
+be in the way. Sturdy country-women, carrying baskets which doubled the
+passage room they required, hustled Hyacinth into a corner, and for a
+time defeated his efforts to emerge. Getting his case of samples safely
+between his legs, he amused himself watching the patriot shopkeeper and
+his assistants conducting their business. It was perfectly obvious that
+in one respect the announcements of the attractive placard departed
+from the truth: O’Reilly was not a ‘one-price man,’ He charged for every
+article what he thought his customers were likely to pay. The result was
+that every sale involved prolonged bargaining and heated argument. In
+most cases no harm was done. The country-women were keenly alive to the
+value of their money, and evidently enjoyed the process of beating
+down the price by halfpennies until the real value of the article was
+reached. Then Mr. O’Reilly and his assistants were accustomed to close
+the haggle with a beautiful formula:
+
+‘To _you_,’ they said, with confidential smiles and flattering emphasis
+on the pronoun--‘to _you_ the price will be one and a penny; but,
+really, there will be no profit on the sale.’
+
+Occasionally with timid and inexperienced customers O’Reilly’s method
+proved its value. Hyacinth saw him sell a dress-length of serge to a
+young woman with a baby in her arms for a penny a yard more than he
+had charged a moment before for the same material. Another thing which
+struck him as he watched was the small amount of actual cash which was
+paid across the counter. Most of the women, even those who seemed quite
+poor, had accounts in the shop, and did not shrink from increasing
+them. Once or twice a stranger presented some sort of a letter of
+introduction, and was at once accommodated with apparently unlimited
+credit.
+
+At length there was a lull in the business, and Hyacinth succeeded in
+spreading his goods on a vacant counter, and attracting the attention of
+Mr. O’Reilly. He began with shawls.
+
+‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that you will give me a good order for these
+shawls.’
+
+Mr. O’Reilly fingered them knowingly.
+
+‘Price?’ he said.
+
+Hyacinth mentioned a sum which left a fair margin of profit for Mr.
+Quinn. O’Reilly shook his head and laughed.
+
+‘Can’t do it.’
+
+Hyacinth reduced his price at once as far as possible.
+
+‘No use,’ said Mr. O’Reilly.
+
+Compared with the suave oratory to which he treated his customers, this
+extreme economy of words was striking.
+
+‘See here,’ he said, producing a bundle of shawls from a shelf beside
+him. ‘I get these for twenty-five shillings a dozen less from Thompson
+and Taylor of Manchester.’
+
+Hyacinth looked at them curiously. Each bore a prominent label setting
+forth a name for the garment in large letters surrounded with wreaths
+of shamrocks. ‘The Colleen Bawn,’ he read, ‘Erin’s Own,’ ‘The Kathleen
+Mavourneen,’ ‘The Cruiskeen Lawn.’ The appropriateness of this last
+title was not obvious to the mere Irishman, but the colour of the
+garment was green, so perhaps there was a connection of thought in the
+maker’s mind between that and ‘Lawn.’ ‘Cruiskeen’ he may have taken for
+the name of a place.
+
+‘Are these,’ asked Hyacinth, ‘what you advertise as Irish goods?’
+
+Mr. O’Reilly cleared his throat twice before he replied.
+
+‘They are got up specially for the Irish market.’ In the interests of
+his employer Hyacinth kept his temper, but the effort was a severe one.
+
+‘These,’ he said, ‘are half cotton. Mine are pure wool. They are really
+far better value even if they were double the price.’
+
+Mr. O’Reilly shrugged his shoulders.
+
+‘I don’t say they’re not, but I should not sell one of yours for every
+dozen of the others.’
+
+‘Try,’ said Hyacinth; ‘give them a fair chance. Tell the people that
+they will last twice as long. Tell them that they are made in Ireland.’
+
+‘That would not be the slightest use. They would simply laugh in my
+face. My customers don’t care a pin where the goods are made. I have
+never in my life been asked for Irish manufacture.’
+
+‘Then, why on earth do you stick up those advertisements?’ said
+Hyacinth, pointing to the ‘Féach Annseo’ which appeared on a hoarding
+across the street.
+
+Mr. O’Reilly was perfectly frank and unashamed.
+
+‘The other drapery house in the town is owned by a Scotchman, and of
+course it pays more or less to keep on saying that I am Irish. Besides,
+I mean to stand for the Urban Council in March, and those sort of ads.
+are useful at an election, even if they are no good for business.’
+
+‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ said Hyacinth, shirking a discussion on
+the morality of advertising: ‘I’ll let you have a dozen shawls at cost
+price, and take back what you can’t sell, if you give me your word to do
+your best for them.’
+
+Similar discussions followed the display of serges and blankets. It
+appeared that nice-looking goods could be sent over from England at
+lower prices. It was vain for Hyacinth to press the fact that his things
+were better. Mr. O’Reilly admitted as much.
+
+‘But what am I to do? The people don’t want what is good. They want a
+cheap article which looks well, and they don’t care a pin whether the
+thing is made in England, Ireland, or America. Take my advice,’ he added
+as Hyacinth left the shop: ‘get your boss to do inferior lines--cheap,
+cheap and showy.’
+
+So far Mr. Hollywell’s opinions were entirely justified. The appeal of
+the patriotic press to the public and the shopkeepers on behalf of the
+industrial revival of Ireland had certainly not affected the town of
+Clogher. Hyacinth was bitterly disappointed; but hope, when it is born
+of enthusiasm, dies hard, and he was greatly interested in a speech
+which he read one day in the ‘Mayo Telegraph’. It had been made at a
+meeting of the League by an Ardnaree shopkeeper called Dowling. A trade
+rival--the fact of the rivalry was not emphasized--had advertised in
+a Scotch paper for a milliner. Dowling was exceedingly indignant. He
+quoted emigration statistics showing the number of girls who left Mayo
+every year for the United States. He pointed out that all of them might
+be employed at home, as milliners or otherwise, if only the public would
+boycott shops which sold English goods or employed Scotch milliners.
+He more than suspected that the obnoxious advertisement was part of an
+organized attempt to effect a new plantation of Connaught--‘worse than
+Cromwell’s was.’ The fact that Connaught was the only part of Ireland
+which Cromwell did not propose to plant escaped the notice of both
+Mr. Dowling and his audience. The speech concluded with a passionate
+peroration and a verse, no doubt declaimed soundingly, of ‘The West’s
+Awake.’
+
+Hyacinth made an expedition to Ardnaree, and called hopefully on the
+orator. His reception was depressing in the extreme. The shop, which was
+large and imposing, was stocked with goods which were obviously English,
+and Mr. Dowling curtly refused even to look at the samples of Mr.
+Quinn’s manufactures. Hyacinth quoted his own speech to the man, and was
+amazed at the cynical indifference with which he ignored the dilemma.
+
+‘Business is one thing,’ he said, ‘and politics is something entirely
+different.’
+
+Hyacinth lost his temper completely.
+
+‘I shall write to the papers,’ he said, ‘and expose you. I shall have
+your speech reprinted, and along with it an account of the way you
+conduct your business.’
+
+A mean, hard smile crossed Mr. Dowling’s mouth before he answered:
+
+‘Perhaps you don’t know that my wife is the Archbishop’s niece?’
+
+Hyacinth stared at him. For a minute or two he entirely failed to
+understand what Mrs. Dowling’s relationship to a great ecclesiastic had
+to do with the question. At last a light broke on him.
+
+‘You mean that an editor wouldn’t print my letter because he would be
+afraid of offending a Roman Catholic Archbishop?’
+
+The expression ‘Roman Catholic’ caught Mr. Dowling’s attention.
+
+‘Are you a Protestant?’ he asked. ‘You are--a dirty Protestant--and you
+dare to come here into my own house, and insult me and trample on my
+religious convictions. I’m a Catholic and a member of the League. What
+do you mean, you Souper, you Sour-face, by talking to me about Irish
+manufactures? Get out of this house, and go to the hell that’s waiting
+for you!’
+
+As Hyacinth turned to go, there flashed across his mind the recollection
+of Miss Goold and her friends who wrote for the _Croppy_.
+
+‘There’s one paper in Ireland, anyhow,’ he said, ‘which is not afraid
+of your wife nor your Archbishop. I’ll write to the _Croppy_, and you’ll
+see if they won’t publish the facts.’
+
+Mr. Dowling grinned.
+
+‘I don’t care if they do,’ he said. ‘The priests are dead against the
+_Croppy_, and there’s hardly a man in the town reads it. Go up there
+now to Hely’s and try if you can buy a copy. I tell you it isn’t on sale
+here at all, and whatever they publish will do me no harm.’
+
+When Hyacinth returned to the hotel he found Mr. Holywell seated, with
+the inevitable whisky-and-water beside him, in the commercial-room.
+
+‘Well, Mr. Conneally,’ he said, ‘and how is patriotism paying you? Find
+people ready to buy what’s Irish?’
+
+Hyacinth, boiling over with indignation, related his experience with Mr.
+Dowling.
+
+‘What did I tell you?’ said Mr. Hollywell. ‘But anyhow you’re just as
+well out of a deal with that fellow. I wouldn’t care to do business with
+him myself. I happen to know, and you may take my word for it’--his
+voice sunk to a confidential whisper--‘that he’s very deep in the books
+of two English firms, and that he daren’t--simply daren’t--place
+an order with anyone else. They’d have him in the Bankruptcy Court
+to-morrow if he did. I shouldn’t feel easy with Mr. Dowling’s cheque for
+an account until I saw how the clerk took it across the bank counter.
+You mark my words, there’ll be a fire in that establishment before the
+year’s out.’
+
+The prophecy was fulfilled, as Hyacinth learnt from the _Mayo
+Telegraphy_ and Mr. Dowling’s whole stock of goods was consumed. There
+were rumours that a sceptical insurance company made difficulties about
+paying the compensation demanded; but the inhabitants of Ardnaree marked
+their confidence in the husband of an Archbishop’s niece by presenting
+him with an address of sympathy and a purse containing ten sovereigns.
+
+Most of Hyacinth’s business was done with small shopkeepers in remote
+districts. The country-people who lived out of reach of such centres
+of fashion as Ardnaree and Clogher were sufficiently unsophisticated to
+prefer things which were really good. Hats and bonnets were not quite
+universal among the women in the mountain districts far back where they
+spoke Irish, and Mr. Quinn’s head-kerchiefs were still in request. Even
+the younger women wanted garments which would keep them warm and dry,
+and Hyacinth often returned well satisfied from a tour of the country
+shops. Sometimes he doubted whether he ought to trust the people with
+more than a few pounds’ worth of goods, but he gradually learnt that,
+unlike the patriotic Mr. Dowling, they were universally honest. He
+discovered, too, that these people, with their imperfect English and
+little knowledge of the world, were exceedingly shrewd. They had very
+little real confidence in oratorical politicians, and their interest
+in public affairs went no further than voting consistently for the
+man their priest recommended. But they quickly understood Hyacinth’s
+arguments when he told them that the support of Irish manufactures would
+help to save their sons and daughters from the curse of emigration.
+
+‘Faith, sir,’ said a shopkeeper who kept a few blankets and tweeds among
+his flour-sacks and porter-barrels, ‘since you were talking to the boys
+last month, I couldn’t induce one of them to take the foreign stuff if I
+was to offer him a shilling along with it.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+When he returned to Ballymoy after his interview with Mr. Dowling,
+Hyacinth set himself to fulfil his threat of writing to the _Croppy_.
+He spent Saturday afternoon and evening in his lodgings with the paper
+containing the blatant speech spread out before him. He blew his anger
+to a white heat by going over the evidence of the man’s grotesque
+hypocrisy. He wrote and rewrote his article. It was his first attempt
+at expressing thought on paper since the days when he sought to satisfy
+examiners with disquisitions on Dryden’s dramatic talent and other
+topics suited to the undergraduate mind. This was a different business.
+It was no longer a question of filling a sheet of foolscap with
+grammatical sentences, discovering synonyms for words hard to spell. Now
+thoughts were hot in him, and the art lay in finding words which would
+blister and scorch. Time after time he tore up a page of bombast or
+erased ridiculous flamboyancies. Late at night, with a burning head and
+ice-cold feet, he made his last copy, folded it up, and, distrusting the
+cooler criticism of the morning, went out and posted it to the _Croppy_.
+
+A letter from Miss Goold overtook him the following Thursday in the
+hotel at Clogher.
+
+‘I was delighted to hear from you again,’ she wrote. ‘I was afraid
+you had cut me altogether, gone over to the respectable people, and
+forgotten poor Ireland. Captain Quinn told me that you and he had
+quarrelled, and I gathered that you rather disapproved of him. Well, he
+was a bit of a blackguard; but, after all, one doesn’t expect a man
+who takes on a job of that kind to be anything else. I never thought
+it would suit you, and you will do me the justice of remembering that I
+never wanted you to volunteer. Now about your article. It was admirable.
+These “Cheap Patriots”’--it was thus the article was headed--‘are just
+the creatures we want to scarify. Dowling and his kind are the worst
+enemies Ireland has to-day. We’ll publish anything of that kind you send
+us, and remember we’re not the least afraid of anybody. It’s a grand
+thing for a paper to be as impecunious as the _Croppy_. No man but
+a fool would take a libel action against us with any hope of getting
+damages. A jury might value Dowling’s character at any fantastic sum
+they chose, but it would be a poor penny the _Croppy_ would pay. Still,
+we’re not so hard up that we can’t give our contributors something,
+and next week you’ll get a small cheque from the office. I hope it may
+encourage you to send us more. Don’t be afraid to speak out. If anything
+peculiarly seditious occurs to you, write it in Irish. I know it’s all
+the same to you which language you write in. Do us half a column every
+fortnight or so on Western life and politics.’
+
+Hyacinth was absurdly elated by Miss Goold’s praise. He made up his
+mind to contribute regularly to the _Croppy_, and had visions of a great
+future as a journalist, or perhaps a literary exponent of the ideas of
+Independent Ireland.
+
+Meanwhile, he became very intimate both with the Quinns and with Canon
+Beecher’s family. Mrs. Quinn was an enthusiastic gardener, and early in
+the spring Hyacinth helped her with her flowerbeds. He learnt to plait
+the foliage of faded crocuses, and pin them tidily to the ground with
+little wooden forks. He gathered suitable earth for the boxes in which
+begonias made their earliest sproutings, and learned to know the
+daffodils and tulips by their names. Later on he helped Mr. Quinn to mow
+the grass and mix a potent weed-killer for the gravel walks. There came
+to be an understanding that, whenever he was not absent on a journey, he
+spent the latter part of the afternoon and the evening with the Quinns.
+As the days lengthened the family tea was pushed back to later and later
+hours to give more time out of doors.
+
+There is something about the very occupation of gardening which is
+deadening to enthusiasm. Perhaps a man learns patience by familiarity
+with growing plants. Nature is never in a hurry in a garden, and there
+is no use in trying to hustle a flower, whereas a great impatience is
+the very life-spirit of enthusiastic patriotism. There has probably
+never been a revolutionary gardener, or even a strong Radical who worked
+with open-air flowers. Of course, in greenhouses things can be forced,
+and the spirit of the ardent reformer may find expression in the nurture
+of premature blooms. Perhaps also the constant stooping which gardening
+necessitates, especially in the early spring, when the weeds grow
+plentifully, tends to destroy the stiff mental independence which must
+be the attitude of the militant patriot. It is very difficult for a man
+who has stooped long enough to have conquered his early cramps and aches
+to face the problems of politics with uncompromising rigidity. Hyacinth
+recognised with a curious qualm of disgust that his thoughts turned less
+and less to Ireland’s wrongs and Ireland’s future as he learnt to care
+for the flowers and the grass.
+
+No doubt, too, the atmosphere of the Quinns’ family life was not
+congenial to the spirit of the Irish politician. Mrs. Quinn was totally
+uninterested in politics, and except a prejudice in favour of what she
+called loyalty, had absolutely no views on any question which did
+not directly affect her home and her children. Mr. Quinn had a
+coldly-reasonable political and economic creed, which acted on the
+luxuriant fancies of Hyacinth’s enthusiasm as his weed-killer did on
+the tender green of the paths. He declined altogether to see any good in
+supporting Irish manufactures simply because they were Irish. The story
+of O’Reilly’s attitude towards his shawls moved him to no indignation.
+
+‘I think he’s perfectly right,’ he said. ‘If a man can buy cheap shawls
+in England he would be a fool to pay more for Irish ones. Business can’t
+be run on those lines. I’m not an object of charity, and if I can’t
+meet fair competition I must go under, and it’s right that I should go
+under.’
+
+Hyacinth had no answer to give. He shirked the point at issue, and
+attacked Mr. Quinn along another line in the hope of arousing his
+indignation.
+
+‘But it is not fair competition that you are called upon to face. Do
+you call it fair competition when the Government subsidizes a woollen
+factory in a convent?’
+
+‘Ah!’ said Mr. Quinn, ‘you are thinking of the four thousand pounds
+the Congested Districts Board gave to the convent at Bobeen. But it is
+hardly fair to hold the Government responsible for the way that body
+wastes eighty thousand pounds a year.’
+
+‘The Government is ultimately responsible, and you must admit that,
+after such a gift, and in view of the others which will certainly
+follow, you are called upon to meet most unfair competition.’
+
+‘Yes, I admit that. But isn’t that exactly what you want to make
+general? There doesn’t seem to me any difference between giving a bounty
+to one industry and imposing a protective tariff in favour of another;
+and if your preference for Irish manufactures means anything, it means
+a sort of voluntary protection for every business in the country. If you
+object to the Robeen business being subsidized you can’t logically try
+to insist on mine being protected.’
+
+It was puzzling to have the tables turned on him so adroitly. Hyacinth
+was reduced to feeble threat.
+
+‘Just wait a while till the nuns get another four thousand pounds, and
+perhaps four thousand pounds more after that, and see how it will affect
+you.’
+
+Mr. Quinn smiled.
+
+‘I’m not much afraid of nuns as trade competitors, or, for the matter of
+that, of the Congested Districts Board either. If the Yorkshire people
+would only import a few Mother Superiors to manage their factories,
+and take the advice of members of our Board in their affairs, I would
+cheerfully make them a present of any reasonable subsidy, and beat them
+out of the market afterwards.’
+
+There was another influence at work on Hyacinth’s mind which had as much
+to do with the decay of his patriotism as either the gardening or Mr.
+Quinn’s logic. Marion Beecher and her sister were very frequently at the
+Mill House during the spring and summer. There was one long afternoon
+which was spent in the marking out of the tennis-ground. Mr. Quinn had
+theories involving calculations with a pencil and pieces of paper about
+the surest method of securing right angles at the corners and parallel
+lines down the sides of the court. Hyacinth and Marion worked obediently
+with a tape measure and the garden line. One of the boys messed
+cheerfully with a pail of liquid whitening. Afterwards the gardening was
+somewhat deserted, and Hyacinth was instructed in the game. It took
+him a long time to learn, and for many afternoons he and Marion were
+regularly beaten, but she would not give up hope of him. Often the
+excuse of her coming to the Quinns was the necessity of practising some
+new hymn or chant for Sunday. Hyacinth worked as hard at the music as at
+the tennis under her tuition, and there came a time when he could sing
+an easy tenor part with fair accuracy. Then in the early summer, when
+the evenings were warm, hymns were sung on the lawn in front of the
+house. There seemed no incongruity in Marion Beecher’s company in
+passing without a break from lawn-tennis to hymn-singing, and Mr. Quinn
+was always ready to do his best at the bass with a serious simplicity,
+as if it were a perfectly natural and usual thing to close an
+afternoon’s amusement with ‘Rock of Ages.’ Hyacinth was not conscious of
+any definite change in his attitude towards religion. He still believed
+himself to be somehow outside the inner shrine of the life which the
+Beechers and the Quinns lived, just as he had been outside his father’s
+prayers. But he found it increasingly difficult after an hour or two of
+companionship with Marion Beecher to get back to the emotions which had
+swayed him during the weeks of his intimacy with Miss Goold. To write
+for the _Croppy_ after sitting beside Marion in church on Sunday
+evenings was like passing suddenly from a quiet wood into a heated
+saloon where people wrangled. A wave of the old passionate feeling, when
+it returned, affected him as raw spirit would the palate of a boy.
+
+One day early in summer--the short summer of Connaught, which is
+glorious in June, and dissolves into windy mist and warm rain in the
+middle of July--Hyacinth was invited by Canon Beecher to join a boating
+party on the lake. The river, whose one useful function was the turning
+of Mr. Quinn’s millwheel, wound away afterwards through marshy fields
+and groves of willow-trees into the great lake. At its mouth the
+Beechers kept their boat, a cumbrous craft, very heavy to row, but safe
+and suited to carry a family in comfort. The party started early--Canon
+Beecher, Hyacinth, and one of the boys very early, for they had to
+walk the two miles which separated Ballymoy from the lake shore. Mrs.
+Beecher, the girls, the two other boys, and the baskets of provisions
+followed a little later on the Rectory car, packed beyond all
+possibility of comfort. The Canon himself pulled an oar untiringly, but
+without the faintest semblance of style, and the party rippled with joy
+when they discovered that Hyacinth also could row.
+
+‘Now,’ said Elsie, ‘we can go anywhere. We can go on rowing and rowing
+all day, and see places we’ve never seen before.’
+
+‘My dear girl,’ said her mother, ‘remember that Mr. Conneally and your
+father aren’t machines. You mustn’t expect them to go too far.’
+
+‘Oh, but,’ said Elsie, ‘father says he never gets tired if he has only
+one oar to pull.’
+
+The Canon was preparing for his toil. The old coat, in colour now almost
+olive green, was folded and used as a cushion by Marion in the bow. His
+white cuffs, stowed inside his hat, were committed to the care of Mrs.
+Beecher. He rolled his gray shirtsleeves up to the elbow, and unbuttoned
+his waistcoat.
+
+‘Now,’ he said, ‘I’m ready. If I’m not hurried, I’ll pull along all day.
+But what about you, Conneally? You’re not accustomed to this sort of
+thing?’
+
+But Hyacinth for once was self-confident. He might be a poor singer and
+a contemptible tennis player, but he knew that nothing which had to do
+with boats could come amiss to him. He looked across the sparkling water
+of the lake.
+
+‘I’ll go on as long as you like. You won’t tire me when there’s no tide
+and no waves. This is a very different business from getting out the
+sweeps to pull a nobby five miles against the strength of the ebb, with
+a heavy ground swell running.’
+
+About eleven o’clock they landed on an island and ate biscuits. The
+Canon told Hyacinth the story of the ruin under whose walls they sat.
+
+‘It belonged to the Lynotts, the Welshmen of Tyrawley. They were at feud
+with the Burkes, and one night in winter----’
+
+The girls wandered away, carrying their biscuits with them. It is
+likely that they had heard the story every summer as long as they could
+remember. Mrs. Beecher alone still maintained an attitude of admiration
+for her husband’s antiquarian knowledge, the more creditable because she
+must have been familiar with the onset of the MacWilliam Burkes before
+even Marion was old enough to listen. To Hyacinth the story was both
+new and interesting. It stirred him to think of the Lynotts fighting
+hopelessly, or begging mercy in the darkness and the cold just where he
+sat now saturate with sunlight and with life. He gazed across the mile
+of shining water which separated the castle from the land, and tried to
+realize how the Irish servant-girl swam from the island with an infant
+Lynott on her back, and saved the name from perishing. How the snow must
+have beaten in her face and the lake-waves choked her breath! It was a
+great story, but the girls, shouting from the water’s edge, reminded him
+that he was out to pull an oar, and not to sentimentalize. He and the
+Canon rose, half smiling, half sighing, and took their places in the
+boat.
+
+They penetrated before luncheon time to a bay hitherto unknown to the
+Beechers. A chorus of delight greeted its discovery. The water shone
+bright green and very clear above the slabs of white limestone. The
+shore far inland was almost verdure-less. Broad flat rocks lay baking
+in the sunshine, and only the scantiest grass struggled up between their
+edges. Sometimes they overlapped each other, and rose like an immense
+staircase. Fifty yards or so from the land was a tiny island entirely
+overgrown with stunted bushes. The boat was pushed up to it and a
+landing-place sought, but the shrubs were too thick, and it was decided
+to picnic among the rocks on the land. Then Marion in the bow made a
+discovery. A causeway about a foot under water led from the island to
+the shore. The whole party leaned over to examine it. Every stone was
+visible in the clear water, and it was obvious that it had been planned
+and built, and was no merely accidental formation of the rocks. The
+Canon had heard of a similar device resorted to by an island hermit
+to insure the privacy of his cell. Hyacinth spoke vaguely of the
+settlements of primitive communities of lake-dwellers. The three boys
+planned an expedition across the causeway after luncheon.
+
+‘We’ll carry our shoes and stockings with us,’ they said, ‘and then
+explore the island. Perhaps there is a hermit there still, or
+a primitive lake-dweller. What is a primitive lake-dweller, Mr.
+Conneally?’
+
+Hyacinth was uncertain, but hazarded a suggestion that the lake-dwellers
+were the people who buried each other in raths. The Canon, whose
+archaeology did not go back beyond St. Patrick, offered no correction.
+
+Tea was made later on in yet another bay, this time on the eastern shore
+of the lake. An oak wood grew down almost to the water’s edge, and the
+branches overhung a sandy beach, more golden than any sea-strand. The
+whole party collected dead wood and broken twigs for the fire. Then,
+while the girls unpacked the baskets and secured the kettle amidst the
+smoke, Hyacinth lay back luxuriously and watched the sun set behind the
+round-shouldered mountain opposite. The long, steep slope shone
+bright green while the sun still rested in view above the summit; then
+suddenly, when the topmost rim of it had dipped out of sight, the whole
+mountainside turned purple, and a glory of gold and crimson hung above
+it on the motionless streaks of cloud. Slowly the splendour faded, the
+purple turned gray, and a faint breeze fluttered across the lake.
+
+The day was the first of many which Hyacinth gave to such expeditions.
+The work of Mr. Quinn’s office was not so pressing as to necessitate
+his spending every day there when he was in Ballymoy, and a holiday
+was always obtainable. The lake scenery remained vivid in his memory in
+after-years, and had its influence upon him even while he enjoyed it,
+unconscious of anything except the present pleasure. There was something
+besides the innocent gaiety of the girls and the simple sincerity of the
+Canon’s platitudes, something about the lake itself, which removed him
+to a spiritual region utterly remote from the fiery atmosphere of Miss
+Goold’s patriotism. Many things which once loomed very large before him
+sank to insignificance as he drank to the full of the desolation around
+him. The past, in which no doubt men strove and hoped, hated and loved
+and feared, had left the just recognisable ruins of some castles and the
+causeway built by an unknown hermit or the prehistoric lake-dwellers.
+A few thatched cabins, faintly smoking, and here and there a cairn of
+stones gathered laboriously off the wretched fields, were the evidences
+of present activity. Now and then a man hooted to his dog as it barked
+at the sheep on the hillside, or a girl drove a turf-laden donkey inland
+from the boggy shore. Otherwise there were no signs of human life. A
+deep sense of monotony and inevitableness settled down upon Hyacinth. He
+came for the first time under the great enchantment which paralyzes
+the spirit and energy of the Celt. He knew himself to be, as his people
+were, capable of spasms of enthusiasm, the victim of transitory burnings
+of soul. But the curse was upon him--the inevitable curse of feeling too
+keenly and seeing too clearly to be strenuous and constant. The flame
+would die down, the enthusiasm would vanish--it was vanishing from him,
+as he knew well--and leave him, not indeed content with common life, but
+patient of it, and to the very end sad with the sense of possibilities
+unrealized.
+
+Yet it was not without many struggles and periods of return to the older
+emotions that Hyacinth surrendered his enthusiasm. There still recurred
+to him memories of his father’s vision of an Armageddon and the
+conception of his own part in it. Sometimes, waking very early in the
+morning, he became vividly conscious of his own feebleness of will and
+his falling away from great purposes. The conviction that he was called
+to struggle for Ireland’s welfare, to sacrifice, if necessary, his life
+and happiness for Ireland, was strong in him still. He felt himself
+affected profoundly by the influences which surrounded him, but he had
+not ceased to believe that the idea of self-sacrificing labour was for
+him a high vocation. He writhed, his limbs twisting involuntarily, when
+these thoughts beset him, and often he was surprised to discover that he
+was actually uttering aloud words of self-reproach.
+
+Then he would write fiercely, brutally, catch at the excuse of some
+hypocrisy or corruption, or else denounce selfishness and easy-going
+patriotic sentiment, finding subject for his satire in himself. His
+articles brought him letters of praise from Miss Goold. ‘You have it,’
+she wrote once, ‘the thing we all seek for, the power of beating red-hot
+thought into sword-blades. Write more like the last.’ But the praise
+always came late. The violent mood, the self-reproach, the bitterness,
+were past. His life was wrapt round again with softer influences, and he
+read his own words with shame when they reached him in print. Afterwards
+for a while, if he wrote at all, it was of the peasant life, of quaint
+customs, half-forgotten legends and folklore. These articles appeared
+too, but brought no praise from Miss Goold. Once she reproached him when
+he lapsed into gentleness for many consecutive weeks.
+
+‘You oughtn’t to waste yourself. There are fifty men and women can do
+the sort of thing you’re doing now; we don’t want you to take it up.
+It’s fighting men we need, not maundering sentimentalists.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+It was during the second year of Hyacinth’s residence in Ballymoy that
+the station-master at Clogher died. The poor man caught a cold one
+February night while waiting for a train which had broken down three
+miles outside his station. From the cold came first pneumonia, and then
+the end. Now, far to the east of Clogher, on a different branch of the
+railway-line, is a town with which the people of Mayo have no connection
+whatever. In it is a very flourishing Masonic lodge. Almost every male
+Protestant in the town and the neighbourhood belongs to it, and the
+Rector of the parish is its chaplain. Among its members at that time was
+an intelligent young man who occupied the position of goods clerk on the
+railway. The Masonic brethren, as in duty bound, used their influence to
+secure his promotion, and brought considerable pressure to bear on the
+directors of the company to have him made station-master at Clogher.
+
+It is said with some appearance of truth that no appointment in Ireland
+is ever made on account of the fitness of the candidate for the post
+to be filled. Whether the Lord Lieutenant has to nominate a Local
+Government Board Inspector, or an Urban Council has to select a street
+scavenger, the principle acted on is the same. No investigation is made
+about the ability or character of a candidate. Questions may be asked
+about his political opinions, his religious creed, and sometimes about
+the social position of his wife, but no one cares in the least about his
+ability. The matter really turns upon the amount of influence which
+he can bring to bear. So it happened that John Crawford, Freemason and
+Protestant, was appointed station-master at Clogher. Of course, nobody
+really cared who got the post except a few seniors of John Crawford’s,
+who wanted it for themselves. Probably even they would have stopped
+grumbling after a month or two if it had not happened that a leading
+weekly newspaper, then at the height of its popularity and influence,
+was just inaugurating a crusade against Protestants and Freemasons.
+The case of John Crawford became the subject of a series of bitter and
+vehement articles. It was pointed out that although Roman Catholics were
+beyond all question more intelligent, better educated, and more upright
+than Protestants, they were condemned by the intolerance of highly-paid
+officials to remain hewers of wood and drawers of water. It was shown by
+figures which admitted of no controversy that Irish railways, banks, and
+trading companies were, without exception, on the verge of bankruptcy,
+entirely owing to the apathy of shareholders who allowed their interests
+to be sacrificed to the bigotry of directors. It was urged that a
+public meeting should be held at Clogher to protest against the new
+appointment.
+
+The meeting was convened, and Father Fahey consented to occupy the
+chair. He was supported by a dispensary doctor, anxious to propitiate
+the Board of Guardians with a view to obtaining a summer holiday; a
+leading publican, who had a son at Maynooth; a grazier, who dreaded the
+possible partition of his ranch by the Congested Districts Board; and
+Mr. O’Reilly, who saw a hope of drawing custom from the counter of his
+rival draper, the Scotchman.
+
+Father Fahey opened the proceedings with a speech. He assured his
+audience that he was not actuated by any spirit of religious bigotry
+or intolerance. He wished well to his Protestant fellow-countrymen,
+and hoped that in the bright future which lay before Ireland men of all
+creeds would be united in working for the common good of their country.
+These sentiments were not received with vociferous applause. The
+audience was perfectly well aware that something much more to the point
+was coming, and reserved their cheers. Father Fahey did not
+disappoint them. He proceeded to show that the appointment of the new
+station-master was a deliberate insult to the faith of the inhabitants
+of Clogher.
+
+‘Are we,’ he asked, ‘to submit tamely to having the worst evils of the
+old ascendancy revived in our midst?’
+
+He was followed by the dispensary doctor, who also began by declaring
+his freedom from bigotry. He confused the issue slightly by complaining
+that the new station-master was entirely ignorant of the Irish language.
+It was perfectly well known that in private life the doctor was in the
+habit of expressing the greatest contempt for the Gaelic League, and
+that he could not, if his life depended on it, have translated even Mr.
+O’Reilly’s advertisements; but his speech was greeted with tumultuous
+cheers. He proceeded to harrow the feelings of his audience by
+describing what he had heard at the railway-station one evening while
+waiting for the train. As he paced the platform his attention was
+attracted by the sound of a piano in the station-master’s house. He
+listened, and, to his amazement and disgust, heard the tune of a popular
+song, ‘a song’--he brought down his fist on the table as he uttered the
+awful indictment--‘imported from England.’
+
+‘I ask,’ he went on--‘I ask our venerated and beloved parish priest;
+I ask you, fathers of innocent families; I ask every right-thinking
+patriot in this room, are our ears to be insulted, our morals corrupted,
+our intellects depraved, by sounds like these?’
+
+He closed his speech by proposing a resolution requiring the railway
+company to withdraw the obnoxious official from their midst.
+
+The oratory of the grazier, who seconded the resolution, was not
+inferior. It filled his heart with a sense of shame, so he said, to
+think of his cattle, poor, innocent beasts of the field, being
+handled by a Protestant. They had been bred, these bullocks of his,
+by Catholics, fed by Catholics, were owned by a Catholic, bought with
+Catholic money at the fairs, and yet they were told that in all Ireland
+no Catholic could be discovered fit to put them into a train.
+
+Neither the resolution itself nor the heart-rending appeal of the
+grazier produced the slightest effect on the railway company. John
+Crawford continued to sell tickets, even to Father Fahey himself, and
+appeared entirely unconcerned by the fuss.
+
+About a fortnight after the meeting Hyacinth spent a night in Clogher.
+Mr. Holywell, the cigarette man, happened to be in the hotel, and, as
+usual, got through a good deal of desultory conversation while he drank
+his whisky-and-water. Quite unexpectedly, and apropos of nothing that
+had been said, he plumped out the question:
+
+‘What religion are you, Conneally?’
+
+The inquiry was such an unusual one, and came so strangely from Mr.
+Holywell, who had always seemed a Gallio in matters spiritual, that
+Hyacinth hesitated.
+
+‘I’m a Baptist myself,’ he went on, apparently with a view to palliating
+his inquisitiveness by a show of candour. ‘I find it a very convenient
+sort of religion in Connaught. There isn’t a single place of worship
+belonging to my denomination in the whole province, so I’m always able
+to get my Sundays to myself. I don’t want to convert you to anything or
+to argue with you, but I have a fancy that you are a Church of Ireland
+Protestant.’
+
+Hyacinth admitted the correctness of the guess, and wondered what was
+coming next.
+
+‘Ever spend a Sunday here?’
+
+‘Never,’ said Hyacinth; ‘I always get back home for the end of the week
+if I can.’
+
+‘Ah! Well, do you know, if I were you, I should spend next Sunday here,
+and go to Mass.’
+
+‘I shall not do anything of the sort.’
+
+‘Well, it’s your own affair, of course; only I just think I should do it
+if I were you. Good-night.’
+
+‘Wait a minute,’ said Hyacinth. ‘I want to know what you mean.’
+
+Mr. Holywell sat down again heavily.
+
+‘Been round your customers here lately?’
+
+‘No. I only arrived this evening, and have done nothing yet. I mean to
+go round them to-morrow.’
+
+‘You may just as well go home by the early train for all the good you’ll
+do.’
+
+Hyacinth restrained himself with an effort. He reflected that he was
+more likely to get at the meaning of these mysterious warnings if he
+refrained from direct questioning. After a minute of two of silence Mr.
+Hollywell went on:
+
+‘They had a meeting here a little while ago about the appointment of
+a Protestant station-master. They didn’t take much by it so far as the
+railway company is concerned, but I happen to know that word has gone
+round that every shopkeeper in the town is to order his goods as far as
+possible from Catholics. Now, everybody knows your boss is a Protestant,
+but the people are a little uncertain about you. They’ve never seen you
+at Mass, which is suspicious, but, on the other hand, the way you gas on
+about Irish manufactures makes them think you can’t be a Protestant.
+The proper thing for you to do is to lie low till you’ve put in an
+appearance at Mass, and then go round and try for orders.’
+
+‘That’s the kind of thing,’ said Hyacinth, ‘that I couldn’t do if I had
+no religion at all; but it happens that I have convictions of a sort,
+and I don’t mean to go against them.’
+
+‘Oh, well, as I said before, it’s your own affair; only better
+Protestants than you have done as much. Why, I do it myself constantly,
+and everyone knows that a Baptist is the strongest kind of Protestant
+there is.’
+
+This reasoning, curiously enough, proved unconvincing.
+
+‘I can’t believe,’ said Hyacinth, ‘that a religious boycott of the kind
+is possible. People won’t be such fools as to act clean against their
+own interests. Considering that nine-tenths of the drapery goods in the
+country come from England and are sold by Protestant travellers, I don’t
+see how the shopkeepers could act as you say.’
+
+‘Oh, of course they won’t act against their own interests. I’ve never
+come across a religion yet that made men do that. They won’t attempt to
+boycott the English firms, because, as you say, they couldn’t; but they
+can boycott you. Everything your boss makes is turned out just as well
+and just as cheap, or cheaper, by the nuns at Robeen. Perhaps you didn’t
+know that these holy ladies have hired a traveller. Well, they have, and
+he’s a middling smart man, too--quite smart enough to play the trumps
+that are put into his hand; and he’s got a fine flush of them now. What
+with the way that wretched rag of a paper, which started all the fuss,
+goes on rampaging, and the amount of feeling that’s got up over the
+station-master, the peaceablest people in the place would be afraid to
+deal with a Protestant at the present moment. The Robeen man has the
+game in his own hands, and I’m bound to say he’d be a fool if he didn’t
+play it for all it’s worth. I’d do it myself if I was in his shoes.’
+
+Hyacinth discovered next day that Mr. Holywell had summed up the
+situation very accurately. No point-blank questions were asked about his
+religion, but he could by no means persuade his customers to give him
+even a small order. Every shop-window was filled with goods placarded
+ostentatiously as ‘made in Robeen.’ Every counter had tweeds, blankets,
+and flannels from the same factory. No one was in the least uncivil to
+him, and no one assigned any plausible reason for refusing to deal with
+him. He was simply bowed out as quickly as possible from every shop he
+entered.
+
+He returned home disgusted and irritated, and told his tale to his
+employer. Mr. Quinn recognised the danger that threatened him. For the
+first time, he admitted that his business was being seriously injured
+by the competition of Robeen. He took Hyacinth into his confidence more
+fully than he had ever done before, and explained what seemed to be a
+hopeful plan.
+
+‘I may tell you, Conneally, that I have very little capital to fall back
+upon in my business. Years ago when things were better than they are
+now, I had a few thousands put by, but most of it went on buying my
+brother Albert’s share of the mill. Lately I have not been able to save,
+and at the present moment I can lay hands on very little money. Still, I
+have something, and what I mean to do is this: I shall give up all idea
+of making a profit for the present. I shall even sell my goods at a
+slight loss, and try to beat the nunnery out of the market. I think
+this religious animosity will weaken after a while, and if we offer the
+cheapest goods we must in the end get back our customers.’
+
+Hyacinth was not so sanguine.
+
+‘You forget,’ he said, ‘that these people have Government money at their
+backs, and are likely to get more of it. If you sell at a loss they will
+do so, too, and ask for a new grant from the Congested Districts Board
+to make good their deficiency.’
+
+Mr. Quinn sighed.
+
+‘That is quite possible,’ he said. ‘But what can I do? I must make a
+fight for my business.’
+
+Hyacinth hesitated.
+
+‘Perhaps I have no right to make the suggestion, but it seems to me that
+you are bound to be beaten. Would it not be better to give in at once?
+Don’t risk the money you have safe. Keep it, and try to sell the mill
+and the business.’
+
+‘I shall hold on,’ said Mr. Quinn.
+
+‘Ought you not to think of your wife? Remember what it will mean to
+her if you are beaten in the end, when your savings are gone and your
+business unsaleable.’
+
+For a moment there were signs of wavering in Mr. Quinn’s face. The
+fingers of his hands twisted in and out of each other, and a pitiable
+look of great distress came into his eyes. Then he unclasped his hands
+and placed them flat on the table before him.
+
+‘I shall hold on,’ he said. ‘I shall not close my mill while I have a
+shilling left to pay my workers with.’
+
+‘Well,’ said Hyacinth, ‘it is for you to decide. At least, you can count
+on my doing my best, my very best.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+Mr. Quinn carried on his struggle for nearly a year, although from the
+very first he might have recognised its hopelessness. Time after time
+Hyacinth made his tour, and visited the shopkeepers who had once been
+his customers. Occasionally he succeeded in obtaining orders, and a
+faint gleam of hope encouraged him, but he had no steady success. Mr.
+Quinn’s original estimate of the situation was so far justified that
+after a while the religious animosity died out. Shopkeepers even
+explained apologetically that they gave their orders to the Robeen
+convent for purely commercial reasons.
+
+‘Their goods are cheaper than yours, and that’s the truth, Mr.
+Conneally.’
+
+Hyacinth recognised that Mr. Quinn was being beaten at his own game. He
+had attempted to drive the nuns out of the market by underselling them,
+and now it appeared that they, too, were prepared to face a loss. It was
+obvious that their losses must be great, much greater than Mr. Quinn’s.
+Rumours were rife of large loans raised by the Mother Superior, of
+mortgages on the factory buildings and the machinery. These stories
+brought very little consolation, for, as Hyacinth knew, Mr. Quinn was
+very nearly at the end of his resources. He refused to borrow.
+
+‘When I am forced to close up,’ he said, ‘I shall do so with a clear
+balance-sheet. I have no wish for bankruptcy.’
+
+‘I should like,’ said Hyacinth vindictively, ‘to see the Reverend Mother
+reduced to paying a shilling in the pound.’
+
+‘I am afraid,’ said Mr. Quinn, ‘you won’t see that. The convent is a
+branch of an immense organization. No doubt, if it comes to a pinch,
+funds will be forthcoming.’
+
+‘Yes, and they won’t draw on their own purse till they have got all
+they can out of the Congested Districts Board. I have no doubt they are
+counting on another four thousand pounds to start them clear when they
+have beaten you.’
+
+One day, quite accidentally, Hyacinth came by a piece of information
+about the working of the Robeen factory which startled him. He was
+travelling home by rail. It happened to be Friday, and, as usual in
+the early summer, the train was crowded with emigrants on their way to
+Queenstown. The familiar melancholy crowd waited on every platform.
+Old women weeping openly and men with faces ridiculously screwed and
+puckered in the effort to restrain the rising tears clung to their sons
+and daughters. Pitiful little boxes and carpet bags were piled on
+the platform. Friends clung to hands outstretched through the
+carriage-windows while the train moved slowly out. Then came the long
+mournful wail from those left behind, and the last wavings of farewell.
+At the Robeen station the crowd was no less than elsewhere. The
+carriages set apart for the emigrants were full, and at the last minute
+two girls were hustled into the compartment where Hyacinth sat. A woman,
+their mother, mumbled and slobbered over their hands. An old man, too
+old to be their father, shouted broken benedictions to them. Two
+young men--lovers, perhaps, or brothers--stood red-eyed, desolate and
+helpless, without speaking. After the train had started Hyacinth looked
+at the girls. One of them, a pretty creature of perhaps eighteen years
+old, wept quietly in the corner of the carriage. Beside her lay her
+carpet bag and a brown shawl. On her lap was an orange, and she held a
+crumpled paper bag of biscuits in her hand. There was nothing unusual
+about her. She was just one instance of heartbreak, the heart-break of a
+whole nation which loves home as no other people have ever loved it, and
+yet are doomed, as it seems inevitably, to leave it. She was just one
+more waif thrown into the whirlpool of the great world to toil and
+struggle, succeed barrenly or pitifully fail; but through it all,
+through even the possible loss of faith and ultimate degradation, fated
+to cling to a love for the gray desolate fatherland. The other girl
+was different. Hyacinth looked at her with intense interest. She was the
+older of the two, and not so pretty as her sister. Her face was thin and
+pale, and a broad scar under one ear showed where a surgeon’s knife had
+cut. She sat with her hands folded on her lap, gazing dry-eyed out of
+the window beside her. There was no sign of sorrow on her face, nothing
+but a kind of sulky defiance.
+
+After a while she took the paper bag out of her sister’s hand, opened
+it, and began to eat the gingerbread biscuits it contained. Hyacinth
+spoke to her, but she turned her head away, and would not answer him.
+His voice seemed to rouse the younger sister, who stopped crying and
+looked at him curiously. He tried again, and this time he spoke in
+Irish.
+
+At once the younger girl brightened and answered him. Apparently she had
+no fear that malice could lurk in the heart of a man who spoke her own
+language. In a few minutes she was chatting to him as if he were an old
+friend.
+
+He learnt that the two girls were on their way to New York. They had
+a sister there who had sent them the price of their tickets. Yes, the
+sister was in a situation, was getting good wages, and had clothes ‘as
+grand as a lady’s.’ She had sent home a photograph at Christmas-time,
+which their mother had shown all round the parish. These two were to get
+situations also as soon as they arrived. Oh yes, there was no doubt of
+it: Bridgy had promised. There were four of them left at home--three
+boys and a girl. No doubt in time they would all follow Bridgy to
+America--all but Seumas; he was to have the farm. No, the girls
+could not get married, because their father was too poor to give them
+fortunes. There was nothing for them but to go to America. But their
+mother had not wanted them to go. The clergy and the nuns were against
+the girls going. Indeed, they nearly had them persuaded to send Bridgy’s
+money back.
+
+‘But Onny was set on going.’
+
+She glanced at her sister in the corner of the carriage. Hyacinth turned
+to her.
+
+‘Why do you want to leave Ireland?’
+
+But Onny remained silent, sulky, at it seemed. It was the younger girl
+who answered him.
+
+‘They say it’s a fine life they have out there. There’s good money to be
+earned, and mightn’t we be coming home some day with a fortune?’
+
+‘But aren’t you sorry to leave Ireland?’
+
+Again he looked at the elder girl, and this time was rewarded with a
+flash of defiant bitterness from her eyes.
+
+‘Sorry, is it? No, but I’m glad!’
+
+‘Onny’s always saying that there was nothing to be earned in the
+factory. And she got more than the rest of us. Wasn’t she the first girl
+that Sister Mary Aloysius picked out of the school when the young lady
+from England came over to teach us? She was the best worker they had.’
+
+‘It’s true what she says,’ said Onny. ‘I was the best worker they had. I
+worked for them for three years, and all I was getting at the end of it
+was six shillings a week. Why would I be working for that when I might
+be getting wages like Bridgy’s in America? What sense would there be in
+it?’
+
+‘But why did you work for such wages?’
+
+‘Well, now,’ said the younger girl, ‘how could we be refusing the
+Reverend Mother when she came round the town herself, and gave warning
+that we’d all be wanted?’
+
+‘There’s few,’ continued Onny, without noticing her sister, ‘that earned
+as much as I did. Many a girl works there and has no more than one and
+ninepence to take home at the end of the week.’
+
+Hyacinth began to understand how it was that Mr. Quinn was being
+hopelessly beaten. This was no struggle between two trade rivals, to be
+won by the side with the longer purse. Nor was it simply a fight between
+an independent manufacturer and a firm fed with Government bounties. Mr.
+Quinn’s rival could count on an unlimited supply of labour at starvation
+wages, while he had to hire men and women at the market value of their
+services. He had been sorry for the two girls when they got into the
+train. Now he felt almost glad that they were leaving Ireland. It
+appeared that they had certainly chosen the wiser part.
+
+He arrived at home dejected, and sat down beside the fire in his room
+to give himself up to complete despair. He found no hope anywhere. Irish
+patriotism, so he saw it, was a matter of words and fine phrases. No one
+really believed in it or would venture anything for it. Politics was a
+game at which sharpers cheated each other and the people. The leaders
+were bold only in sordid personal quarrels. The mass of the people were
+utterly untouched by the idea of nationality, in earnest about nothing
+but huckstering and petty gains. Over all was the grip of a foreign
+bureaucracy and a selfish Church tightening slowly, squeezing out the
+nation’s life, grasping and holding fast its wealth. No man any longer
+made any demand except to be allowed to earn what would buy whisky
+enough to fuddle him into temporary forgetfulness of the present misery
+and the imminent tyranny.
+
+The slatternly maid-servant who brought him his meals and made his bed
+tapped at the door.
+
+‘Please, sir, Jimmy Loughlin’s after coming with a letter from Mr.
+Quinn, and he’s waiting to know if you’ll go.’
+
+Hyacinth read the note, which asked him to call on his employer that
+afternoon.
+
+‘Tell him I’ll be there.’
+
+‘Will you have your dinner before you go? The chops is in the pan below.
+Or will I keep them till you come back?’
+
+‘Oh, I’ve time enough. Bring them as soon as they’re cooked, and for
+goodness’ sake see that the potatoes are properly boiled.’
+
+He took up a great English weekly paper, with copies of which Canon
+Beecher supplied him at irregular intervals, and propped it against
+the dish-cover while he ate. The article which caught his attention was
+headed ‘Angels in Connaught.’ It contained an idealized account of the
+work of the Robeen nuns, from whose shoulders it seemed to the writer
+likely that wings would soon sprout. There was a description of the once
+miserable cabins now transformed into homesteads so comfortable that
+English labourers would not disdain them. The people shared in the
+elevation of their surroundings. Men and women, lately half-naked
+savages, starved and ignorant, had risen in the scale of civilization
+and intelligence to a level which almost equalled that of a Hampshire
+villager. The double stream of emigration to the United States and
+migration to the English harvest-fields was stopped. An earthly paradise
+had been created in a howling wilderness by the self-denying labours of
+the holy ladies, aided by the statesmanlike liberality of the Congested
+Districts Board. There was another page of the article, but Hyacinth
+could stand no more.
+
+He stood up and glanced at his watch. It was already nearly five
+o’clock. He pushed his way down the street, where the country-people,
+having completed their week’s marketing, were loading donkeys on the
+footpath or carts pushed backwards against the kerbstone. Women dragged
+their heavily-intoxicated husbands from the public-houses, and girls,
+damp and bedraggled, stood in groups waiting for their parents. He
+turned into the gloomy archway of the mill, unlocked the iron gate, and
+crossed the yard into the Quinns’ garden. The lamp burned brightly in
+the dining-room, and he could see Mrs Quinn in her chair by the fireside
+sewing. Her children sat on the rug at her feet. He saw their faces
+turned up to hers, gravely intent. No doubt she was telling them some
+story. He stood for a minute and watched them, while the peaceful joy
+of the scene entered into his heart. This, no doubt, a home full of such
+love and peace, was the best thing life had got to give. It was God’s
+most precious benediction. ‘Lo, thus shall a man be blessed who feareth
+the Lord.’ He turned and passed on to the door. The servant showed him
+in, not, as he expected, to the sitting-room he had just gazed at, but
+to Mr. Quinn’s study.
+
+It was a desolate chamber. A plain wooden desk like a schoolmaster’s
+stood in one corner, and upon it a feeble lamp. A bookcase surmounted a
+row of cupboards along one wall. Its contents--Hyacinth had often looked
+over them--were a many-volumed encyclopaedia, Macaulay’s ‘History of
+England,’ Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs,’ a series entitled ‘Heroes of the
+Reformation,’ and some bound volumes of a trade journal. Above the
+chimneypiece hung two trout-rods, a landing-net, and an old gun. The
+grate was fireless. It was a room obviously not loved by its owner.
+Neither pleasure nor comfort was looked for in it. It was simply a place
+of escape from the attractions of quiet ease when business overflowed
+the proper office hours. Mr. Quinn rose from his desk when Hyacinth
+entered.
+
+‘I am very glad to see you,’ he said; ‘I want to have a talk with you.’
+
+Hyacinth waited while he arranged and rearranged some papers on the desk
+in front of him. Mr. Quinn, although he had specially sent for Hyacinth,
+seemed in no hurry to get to the subject of the interview. When he did
+speak, it was evident from his tone that the important topic was still
+postponed.
+
+‘How did you get on this week?’
+
+Hyacinth had nothing good to report. He took from his pocket the
+note-book in which he entered his orders, and went over it. It contained
+an attenuated list. Moreover, the harvest had been bad, and old debts
+very difficult to collect. Mr. Quinn listened, apparently not very
+attentively, and when the reading was over said:
+
+‘What you report this week is simply a repetition of the story of the last
+six months. I did not expect it to be different. It makes the decision
+I have to make a little more inevitable, that is all. Mr. Conneally, we
+have been very good friends, and since you have been in my employment I
+have been satisfied with you in every way. Now I am unable to employ you
+any longer. I am giving up my business.’
+
+Hyacinth made an effort to speak, but Mr. Quinn held up his hand and
+silenced him.
+
+‘This week,’ he continued, ‘I received news which settled the matter
+for me. Jameson and Thorpe, the big drapers in Dublin, were my best
+customers for certain goods. Last Monday they wrote that they had an
+offer of blankets at a figure a long way below mine. I didn’t believe
+that articles equal in quality to mine could be produced at the price,
+and wrote a hint to that effect. I received--nothing could have been
+more courteous--a sample of the blankets offered. Well, I admit that it
+was at least equal to what I could supply in every way. I wrote again
+asking as a favour to be supplied with the name of the competing firm. I
+got the answer to-day. Mr. Thorpe wrote himself. The Robeen convent has
+undersold me.’
+
+Hyacinth made another attempt to speak.
+
+‘Let me finish,’ said Mr. Quinn. ‘I had foreseen, of course, that this
+was coming. I have no more capital to fall back upon. I do not mean to
+run into debt. There is nothing for me but to dismiss my employées and
+shut up.’
+
+‘Yes,’ said Hyacinth. ‘And then----’
+
+He knew he had no right to ask a question about the future, but the
+thought of Mrs. Quinn and her children as he had seen them in the
+dining-room almost forced him to inquire what was to happen to them. A
+spasm of extreme pain crossed Mr. Quinn’s face.
+
+‘You are thinking of my wife. It will be hard--yes, very hard. She loved
+this place, her friends here, her garden, and all the quiet, peaceful
+life we have lived. Well, there is to be an end of it. But don’t look so
+desperate.’ He forced himself to smile as he spoke. ‘We shall not starve
+or go to the workhouse. I have a knowledge of woollen goods if I have
+nothing else, and I dare say I can get an appointment as foreman or
+traveller for some big drapery house. But I may not be reduced to that.
+There is a secretary wanted just now in the office of one of the Dublin
+charitable societies. I mean to apply for the post. Canon Beecher and
+our Bishop are both members of the committee, and I am sure will do
+their best for me. The salary is not princely--a hundred and twenty
+pounds a year, I think. But there, I ought not to be talking all this
+time about myself. I must try and do something for you.’
+
+‘Never mind me,’ said Hyacinth; ‘I shall be all right. But I can’t bear
+to think of you and Mrs. Quinn. Poverty like that in Dublin! Have you
+thought what it means? A shabby little house in a crowded street, off at
+the back of somewhere; dirt and stuffiness and vulgarity all around you.
+She can’t be expected to stand it--or you either.’
+
+‘My dear boy,’ said Mr. Quinn, ‘my wife and I have been trying all our
+lives to be Christians. Shall we receive good at the Lord’s hand and not
+evil also? However it may be with me, I know that she will not fail in
+the trial.’
+
+His face lit up as he spoke, and the smile on it was no longer forced,
+but clear and brave. Hyacinth knew that he was once again in the
+presence of that mysterious power which enables men and women to meet
+and conquer loss and pain, against which every kind of misfortune beats
+in vain. His eyes filled with tears as he took Mr. Quinn’s hand and bade
+him good-night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+Hyacinth had three months’ work to do before he actually left Mr.
+Quinn’s employment. He knew that at the end of that time he would be
+left absolutely without income, and that it was necessary for him to
+look out for some other situation. He reckoned up the remains of his
+original capital, and found himself with little more than a hundred
+pounds to fall back upon. Yet he did nothing. From time to time he
+bestirred himself, pondered the newspaper advertisements of vacant
+situations, and mentally resolved to commence his search at once. Always
+some excuse offered itself to justify putting the unpleasant business
+off, and he allowed himself to slip back into the quiet routine of life
+as if no catastrophe threatened him. He was, indeed, far more troubled
+about the Quinns’ future than his own, and when, at the end of April,
+Canon Beecher returned from Dublin with the news that he had secured the
+secretaryship of the Church of Ireland Scriptural Schools Society for
+Mr. Quinn, Hyacinth felt that his mind was relieved of a great anxiety.
+That no such post had been discovered for him did not cost him a
+thought. In spite of his spasmodic efforts to goad himself into a
+condition of reasonable anxiety for his future, there remained half
+consciously present in his mind a conviction that somehow a way of
+getting sufficient food and clothes would offer itself in due time.
+
+The conviction was justified by the event. It was on Saturday evening
+that the Canon returned with his good news, and on Sunday morning
+Hyacinth received a letter from Miss Goold.
+
+‘You have no doubt heard,’ she wrote, ‘that we have got a new editor
+for the Croppy--Patrick O’Dwyer, Mary’s brother. Of course, you remember
+Mary and her unpoetical hysterics the morning after the Rotunda meeting.
+The new editor is a splendid man. He has been on the staff of a New
+York paper for the last five years, and thoroughly understands the whole
+business. But that’s not the best of him. He hates England worse than
+I do. I’m only a child beside him, bursting out into fits of temper
+now and then, and cooling off again. He hates steadily, quietly, and
+intensely. But even that is not all that is to be said. He has got
+brains--brains enough, my dear Hyacinth, to make fools of you and me
+every day and all day long. He has devised a new policy for Ireland. The
+plan is simplicity itself, like all really great plans, and it _must_
+succeed. I won’t go into it now, because I want you to come up to Dublin
+and see O’Dwyer. He tells me that he needs somebody else besides himself
+on the staff of the _Croppy_, which, by the way, is to be enlarged and
+improved. He wants a man who can write a column a week in Irish, as well
+as an article now and then in good strong plain English. I suggested
+your name to him, and showed him some of the articles you had written.
+He was greatly pleased with the one about O’Dowd’s cheap patriotism, and
+liked one or two of the others. He just asked one question about you:
+“Does Mr. Conneally hate England and the Empire, and everything English,
+from the Parliament to the police barrack? It is this hatred which must
+animate the work.” I said I thought you did. I told him how you had
+volunteered to fight for the Boers, and about the day you nearly killed
+that blackguard Shea. He seemed to think that was good enough, and asked
+me to write to you on the subject. We can’t offer you a big salary. The
+editor himself is only to get a hundred pounds a year for the present,
+and I am guaranteeing another hundred for you. I am confident that I
+shan’t have to pay it for more than six months. The paper is sure to go
+as it never went before, and in a few years we shall be able to treble
+O’Dwyer’s salary and double yours. Nothing like such a chance has ever
+offered itself in Irish history before. Everything goes to show that
+this is our opportunity. England is weaker than she has been for
+centuries, is clinging desperately to the last tatters of her old
+prestige. She hasn’t a single statesman capable of thinking or acting
+vigorously. Her Parliament is the laughingstock of Europe. Her Irish
+policy may be summed up in four words--intrigue with the Vatican. In
+Ireland the power of the faithful garrison is gone. The Protestants in
+the North are sick of being fooled by one English party after another.
+The landlords, or what’s left of them, are beginning to discover that
+they have been bought and sold. The Bishops, England’s last line of
+defence, are overreaching themselves, and we are within measurable
+distance of the day when the Church will be put into her proper place.
+There is not so much as a shoneen publican in a country town left who
+believes in the ranting of O’Rourke and his litter of blind whelps.
+Ireland is simply crying out for light and leading, and the _Croppy_
+is going to give both. You always wanted to serve Ireland. Now I am
+offering you the chance. I don’t say you ought to thank me, though you
+will thank me to the day of your death. I don’t say that you have an
+opportunity of becoming a great man. I know you, and I know a better way
+of making sure of you than that. I say to you, Hyacinth Conneally, that
+we want you--just _you_ and nobody else. Ireland wants you.’
+
+The letter, especially the last part of it, was sufficiently ridiculous
+to have moved Hyacinth to a smile. But it did no such thing. On the
+contrary, its rhetoric excited and touched him. The flattery of the
+final sentences elated him. The absurdity of the idea that Ireland
+needed him, a fifth-rate office clerk, an out-of-work commercial
+traveller who had failed to sell blankets and flannels, did not strike
+him at all. The figure of Augusta Goold rose to his mind. She flashed
+before him, an Apocalyptic angel, splended and terrible, trumpet-calling
+him to the last great fight. He forgot in an instant the Quinns and
+their trouble. The years of quietness in Ballymoy, the daily intercourse
+with gentle people, the atmosphere of the religion in which he had
+lived, fell away from him suddenly.
+
+He sat absorbed in an ecstasy of joyful excitement until the jangling of
+Canon Beecher’s church bell recalled him to common life again. It speaks
+for the strength of the habits he had formed in Ballymoy that he rose
+without hesitation and went to take his part in the morning service.
+
+He sat down as usual beside Marion Beecher and her harmonium. He
+listened to her playing until her father entered. He found himself
+gazing at her when she stood up for the opening words of the service.
+He felt himself strangely affected by the gentleness of her face and the
+slender beauty of her form. When she knelt down he could not take
+his eyes off her. There came over him an inexplicable softening, a
+relaxation of the tense excitement of the morning. He thought of her
+kneeling there in the faded shabby church Sunday after Sunday for years
+and years, when he was working at hot pressure far away. He knew just
+how her eyes would look calmly, trustfully up to the God she spoke
+to; how her soul would grow in gentleness; how love would be the very
+atmosphere around her. And all the while he would struggle and fight,
+with no inspiration except a bitter hate. Suddenly there came on him a
+feeling that he could not leave her. The very thought of separation
+was a fierce pain. A desire of her seized on him like uncontrollable
+physical hunger. Wherever he might be, whatever life might have in store
+for him, he knew that his heart would go back to her restlessly, and
+remain unsatisfied without her. He understood that he loved her. Canon
+Beecher’s voice came to him as if from an immense distance:
+
+‘O God, make speed to save us.’
+
+Then he heard very clearly Marion’s sweet voice replying:
+
+‘O Lord, make haste to help us.’
+
+There was a faint shuffling, and the congregation rose to their feet.
+His eyes were still on Marion, and now his whole body quivered with the
+force of his newly-found love. She half turned and looked at him. For
+one instant their eyes met, and he saw in hers a flash of recognition,
+then a strange look of fear, and she turned away from him, flushed and
+trembling. He saw that she had read his heart and knew his love.
+
+‘Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost,’ read
+the Canon heavily.
+
+Hyacinth’s heart swelled in him. His whole being seemed to throb with
+exultation, and he responded in a voice he could not recognise for his.
+
+‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without
+end. Amen.’
+
+Marion stood silent. Her head was bowed down, and her hands clasped
+tight together.
+
+Of the remainder of the morning’s service Hyacinth could never
+afterwards remember anything. No doubt Canon Beecher read the Psalms and
+lessons and prayers; no doubt he preached. Probably, also, hymns were
+sung, and Marion played them, but he could not imagine how. It seemed
+quite impossible that she could have touched the keys with her fingers,
+or that she could have uttered any sound; yet no one had remarked the
+absence of hymns or even noticed any peculiarity in their performance.
+Not till after the service was over did he regain full consciousness
+of himself and his surroundings; then he became exceedingly alert. He
+watched the Canon disappear into the vestry, heard the congregation
+trample down the aisle, listened to Marion playing a final voluntary.
+It seemed to him as he sat there waiting for her to stop that she played
+much longer than usual. He could hear Mrs. Beecher and Mr. Quinn talking
+in the porch, and every moment he expected the Canon to appear. At last
+the music ceased, and the lid of the harmonium was closed and locked. He
+stepped forward and took Marion’s hands in his.
+
+‘Marion,’ he said, ‘I love you. It was only this morning that I found
+it out, but I know--oh, I know--that I love you far, far more than I can
+tell you.’
+
+The hand which lay in his grew cold, and the girl’s head was bowed so
+that he could not see her face. He felt her tremble.
+
+‘Marion, Marion, I love you, love you, love you!’
+
+Then very slowly she raised her head and looked at him. He stooped to
+kiss her lips, and felt her face flush and glow when he touched it. Then
+she drew her hands from his and fled down the church to her mother.
+
+Hyacinth stood agape with wonder at the words which he had spoken. The
+knowledge of his love had come on him like a sudden gust, and he only
+half realized what he had done. He walked back to his lodgings, going
+over and over the amazing words, recalling with flushed astonishment the
+kiss. Then a chilling doubt beset him suddenly. Did Marion know how poor
+he was? Never in his life had the fear of poverty or the desire of
+gain determined Hyacinth’s plans. He knew very well that no such
+considerations would have in any way affected his conduct towards
+Marion. Once he realized that he loved her, the confession of his
+love was quite inevitable. Yet he felt vaguely that he might be judged
+blameworthy. He had read a few novels, and he knew that even the writers
+whose chief business it is to glorify the passion of love do not dare to
+represent it as independent of money. He knew, too, that many penniless
+heroes won admiration--he did not in the least understand why they
+should--by silently deserting affectionate women. He knew that kisses
+were immoral except for those who possessed a modest competence. These
+authorized ethics of marriage engagements were wholly incomprehensible
+to him, and it in no way disquieted his conscience that he had bound
+Marion to him with his kiss; yet he felt that she had a right to know
+what income he hoped to earn, and what kind of home he would have to
+offer her. A hundred pounds a year might be deemed insufficient, and
+he knew that, not being either a raven or a lily, he could not count on
+finding food and clothes ready when he wanted them.
+
+The daughters of the Irish Church clergy, even of the dignitaries, are
+not brought up in luxury. Still, they are most of them accustomed to a
+daily supply of food--plain, perhaps, but sufficient--and will look for
+as much in the homes of their husbands. A girl like Marion Beecher does
+not expect to secure a position which will enable her to send her own
+clothes to a laundress or hire a cook who can make pastry; but it is not
+fair to ask her to wash the family’s blankets or to boil potatoes for a
+pig. Probably her friends would think her lucky in marrying a curate or
+a dispensary doctor with one hundred and fifty pounds a year, and
+the prospect of one-third as much again after a while. But Hyacinth
+remembered that he was poorer than any curate. He determined to put the
+matter plainly before Marion without delay.
+
+The Rectory door was opened for him by Elsie Beecher, and, in spite of
+her wondering protests, Hyacinth walked into the dining-room and asked
+that Marion should be sent to him. The room was empty, as he expected.
+He stood and waited for her, deriving faint comfort and courage from the
+threadbare carpet, patched tablecloth, and poor crazy chairs. They were
+strange properties for a scene with possibilities of deep romance in it,
+but they made his confession of poverty easier.
+
+Marion entered at last and stood beside him. He neither took her hand
+nor looked at her.
+
+‘When I told you to-day that I loved you,’ he said, ‘I ought to have
+told you that I am very poor.’
+
+‘I know it,’ she said.
+
+‘But I am poorer even than you know. I am not in Mr. Quinn’s employment
+any more. I have no settled income, and only a prospect of earning a
+very small one.’ He paused. ‘I shall have to go away from Ballymoy. I
+must live in Dublin. I do not think it is fair to ask you to marry me. I
+shall have no more to live upon than----’
+
+She moved a step nearer to him and laid her hand on his arm.
+
+‘Look at me,’ she said.
+
+He raised his eyes to her face, and saw again there, as he had seen in
+church, the wonderful shining of love, which is stronger than all things
+and holds poverty and hardship cheap.
+
+‘Keep looking at me still,’ she said. ‘Now tell me: Do you really think
+it matters that you are poor? Do you think I care whether you have much
+or little? Tell me.’
+
+He could not answer her, although he knew that there was only one answer
+to her question.
+
+‘Do you think that I love money? Do you doubt that I love you?’
+
+Her voice sunk almost to a whisper as she spoke, and her eyes fell from
+looking into his. Just as when he kissed her in the church, she flushed
+suddenly, but this time she did not try to escape from him. Instead she
+clung to his arm, and hid her face against his shoulder. He put his arms
+round her and held her close.
+
+‘I know,’ he said. ‘I was a fool to come here thinking that my being
+poor would matter. I might have known. Indeed, I think I did know even
+before I spoke to you.’
+
+She had no answer except a long soft laugh, which was half smothered in
+his arms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+On Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons Canon Beecher enjoyed the
+privilege of a fire in his study. He was supposed to be engaged at these
+seasons in the preparation of his sermons, a serious and exacting work
+which demanded solitude and profound quiet. In earlier years he really
+had prepared his sermons painfully, but long practice brings to the
+preacher a certain fatal facility. Old ideas are not improved by being
+clothed in new phrases, and of new ideas--a new idea will occasionally
+obtrude itself even on the Christian preacher--the Canon was exceedingly
+mistrustful. The study was an unexciting and comparatively comfortable
+room. The firelight on winter afternoons played pleasantly on the
+dim gold backs of the works of St. Augustine, a fine folio edition
+bequeathed to Mrs. Beecher by a scholarly uncle, which reposed
+undisturbed along a lower shelf. Adventurous rays occasionally explored
+a faded print of the Good Shepherd which hung above the books, and
+gleamed upon the handle of the safe where the parish registers and
+church plate were stored. The quiet and the process of digesting his
+mid-day dinner frequently tempted the Canon to indulge in a series of
+pleasant naps on Sunday afternoons.
+
+When Hyacinth tapped at the study door and entered, the room was almost
+dark, and the sermon preparation, if proceeding at all, can have got no
+further than the preliminary concatenation of ideas. The Canon, however,
+was aggressively, perhaps suspiciously, wide awake.
+
+‘Who is that?’ he asked. ‘Oh, Conneally, it is you. I am very glad to
+see you. Curiously enough, I thought of going down to call on you this
+afternoon. I wanted to have a talk with you. I dare say you have come up
+to consult me.’
+
+Hyacinth was astonished. How could anyone have guessed what he came
+about? Had Marion told her father already?
+
+‘It is a sad business,’ the Canon went on--’ very distressing and
+perplexing indeed. But so far as you personally are concerned,
+Conneally, I cannot regard it as an unmixed misfortune. You were meant
+for something better, if I may say so, than selling blankets. Now, I
+have a plan for your future, which I talked over last week with an old
+friend of yours. Now that something has been settled about the Quinns,
+we must all give our minds to your affairs.’
+
+Then Hyacinth understood that Canon Beecher expected to be consulted
+about his future plans, and even had some scheme of his own in mind.
+
+‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I shall be very glad of your help and advice,
+although I think I have decided about what I am going to do. It was
+not on that subject I came to speak to you to-day, but on another, more
+important, I think, for you and for me and for Marion.’
+
+‘For Marion?’
+
+‘I ought to tell you at once that I love your daughter Marion, and I am
+sure that she loves me. I want to marry her.’
+
+‘My dear boy! I had not the slightest idea of this. It is one of the
+most extraordinary things--or perhaps extraordinary is not exactly the
+proper word--one of the most surprising things I----’
+
+The Canon stopped abruptly and sat stroking his chin with his forefinger
+in the effort to adjust his mind to the new situation presented to it.
+It was characteristic of the man that the thought of Hyacinth’s poverty
+was not the first which presented itself. Indeed, Canon Beecher was one
+of those unreasonable Christians who are actually convinced of the truth
+of certain paradoxical sayings in the Gospel about wealth and poverty.
+He believed that there were things of more importance in life than the
+possession of money. Fortunately, such Christians are rare, for their
+absurd creed forms a standing menace to the existence of Church and
+sect alike. Fortunately also, ecclesiastical authorities have sufficient
+wisdom to keep these eccentrics in the background, confining them as far
+as possible to remote and obscure places. If ever a few of them escape
+into the open and find means of expressing themselves, the whole
+machinery of modern religion will become dislocated, and the Church will
+very likely relapse into the barbarity of the Apostolic age.
+
+‘I believe, Conneally,’ said the Canon at last, ‘that you are a good
+man. I do not merely mean that you are moral and upright, but that you
+sincerely desire to follow in the footsteps of the Master.’
+
+He looked as if he wanted some kind of answer, at least a confirmation
+of his belief. Fresh from his interview with Marion, and having the
+Canon’s eyes upon him, it did not seem impossible to Hyacinth to answer
+yes. Even the thought of the work he was to engage in with Miss Goold
+and Patrick O’Dwyer seemed to offer no ground for hesitation. Was he
+not enlisting with them to take part in the great battle? He had
+never ceased to believe his father’s words: ‘And the battlefield is
+Ireland--our dear Ireland which we love!’ He felt for the moment that
+he was altogether prepared to make the confession of faith the Canon
+required.
+
+‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am on His side.’
+
+‘And you love Marion? Are you quite sure of that? Are you certain that
+this is not a passing fancy?’
+
+This time Hyacinth had no doubt whatever about his answer.
+
+‘I am as certain of my love as I am of anything in the world.’
+
+‘I am glad. I am very glad that this has happened--for your sake,
+because I have always liked you; also for Marion’s sake. I shall see you
+happy because you love one another, and because you both love the Lord.
+I ask no more than those two things. But I must go and tell my wife at
+once. She will be glad, too.’
+
+He rose and went to the door. With his hand stretched out to open it he
+stopped, struck by a sudden thought.
+
+‘By the way, I ought to ask you--if you mean to be married--have you
+any--I mean it is necessary--I hope you won’t think I am laying undue
+stress upon such matters, but I really--I mean we really ought to
+consider what you are to live upon.’
+
+It was the prospect of imparting the news to his wife which forced this
+speech from him. Mrs. Beecher was, indeed, the least worldly of women.
+Did she not marry the Canon, then a mere curate, on the slenderest
+income, and bear him successively five babies in defiance of common
+prudence? But it had fallen to her lot to order the affairs of the
+household, and she had learnt that the people who give you bread and
+beef demand, after an interval, more or less money in exchange. It was
+likely that, after her first rapture had subsided, she would make some
+inquiry about Hyacinth’s income and prospects. The Canon felt he ought
+to be prepared.
+
+‘Of course, I have lost my position with Mr. Quinn. You know that. But I
+have an offer of work which I hope will lead on to something better,
+and will enable me in a short time to earn enough money to marry on.
+You know--or perhaps you don’t, for I am afraid I never told you’--he
+remembered that he had carefully concealed his connection with the
+_Croppy_ from his friends at Ballymoy, and paused--‘I have done some
+little writing. Oh, nothing very much--not a book, or anything like
+that, only a few articles for the press. Well, a friend of mine has got
+me the offer of a post in connection with a weekly paper. It is not a
+very great thing in itself just now, but it may improve, and there is
+always the prospect of picking up other work of the same kind.’
+
+The Canon, who had never seen even an abstract of one of his own sermons
+in print, had a proper reverence for the men who guide the world’s
+thought through the press.
+
+‘That is very good, Conneally--very satisfactory indeed. I always knew
+you had brains. But why did you never tell me what you were doing? I
+should have been deeply interested in anything you wrote.’
+
+Hyacinth’s conscience smote him.
+
+‘The truth is, that I was sure you wouldn’t approve of the paper I
+wrote for. It is the _Croppy_, the organ of the extreme left wing of the
+Nationalist party. It is Miss Goold--Augusta Goold--who now offers me
+work on that paper. She says---- But you had better read what she says
+for yourself. Then you will know the worst of it.’
+
+He took the letter from his pocket. The Canon lit a candle and read it
+through slowly and attentively. When he had finished he laid it upon the
+table and sat down. Hyacinth waited in extreme anxiety for what was to
+come.
+
+‘I do not like the cause you mean to work for or the people you call
+your friends. I would rather see my daughter’s husband doing almost
+anything else in the world. I would be happier if you proposed to break
+stones upon the roadside. You know what my political opinions are.
+I regard the _Croppy_ as a disloyal and seditious paper, bent upon
+fostering a dangerous spirit.’
+
+Hyacinth listened patiently. He had steeled himself against the hearing
+of some such words, and was determined not to be moved to argument or
+self-defence except as a last resort.
+
+‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that you will at least give me credit for honestly
+acting in accordance with my convictions.’
+
+‘I am sure--quite sure--that you are honest, and believe that your cause
+is the right one. I recognise, too, though this is a very difficult
+thing to do, that you have every right to form and hold your own
+political opinions. It seems to me that they are very wrong and very
+mischievous, but it is quite possible that I am mistaken and prejudiced.
+In any case, I am not called upon to refuse you my affection or to
+separate you from my daughter because we differ about politics.’
+
+Hyacinth breathed a great sigh of relief. He looked at the Canon in
+wonder and admiration. It had been beyond hope that a man grown gray in
+a narrow faith, a faith in which for centuries religion and politics had
+been inextricably blended, could have risen in one clear flight above
+the mire of prejudice. It seemed, even after he had spoken, impossible
+that in Ireland, where political opponents believe each other to be
+thieves and murderers, there could be found even one man, and he from
+the least emancipated class of all, who could understand and practise
+tolerance.
+
+‘I say,’ went on the Canon, speaking very slowly, and with evident
+difficulty, ‘that I have no right to put you away from me because of
+your political opinions. But there is something here ‘--he touched Miss
+Goold’s letter--’ from which I must by all means try to save you.
+Will you let me speak to you, not as Marion’s father, not even as your
+friend, but as Christ’s ambassador set here to watch for your soul? But
+I need not excuse myself for what I am about to say. You will at least
+listen to me patiently.’
+
+He took up Miss Goold’s letter and searched through it for a short time;
+then he read aloud:
+
+‘“He just asked one question about you: Does Mr. Conneally hate England
+and the Empire and everything English, from the Parliament to the police
+barrack? For it is this hatred which must animate our work. I said
+I thought you did.” Now consider what those words mean. You are to
+dedicate your powers, the talents God has given you, to preaching
+a gospel of hate. This is not a question of politics. I am ready
+to believe that in the contest of which our unhappy country is the
+battle-ground a man may be either on your side or mine, and yet be
+a follower of Christ. It is impossible to think that anyone can
+deliberately, with his eyes open, accept hatred for the inspiration of
+his life and still be true to Him.’
+
+Hyacinth was greatly moved by the solemnity with which the Canon spoke.
+There was that in him which witnessed to the truth of what he heard. Yet
+he refused to be convinced. When he spoke it was clear that he was not
+addressing his companion, for his eyes were fixed upon the picture of
+the Good Shepherd, faintly illuminated by the candle light. He desired
+to order his own thought on the dilemma, to justify, if he could, his
+own position to himself. ‘It is true that the Gospel of Christ is a
+Gospel of love. Yet there are circumstances in which it is wrong to
+follow it. Is it possible to rouse our people out of their sordid
+apathy, to save Ireland for a place among the nations, except by
+preaching a mighty indignation against the tyranny which has crushed us
+to the dust?’
+
+He felt that Canon Beecher’s eyes never left him for a moment while he
+spoke. He looked up, and saw in them an intense pleading. There
+stole over him a desire to yield, to submit himself to this appealing
+tenderness. He defended himself desperately against his weakness.
+
+‘I am not choosing the pleasanter way. It would be easier for me to give
+up the fight for Ireland, to desert the beaten side, to forget the lost
+cause.’ He turned to Canon Beecher, speaking almost fiercely: ‘Do you
+think it is a small thing for me to surrender your friendship, and
+perhaps--perhaps to lose Marion? Is there not _some_ of the nobility of
+sacrifice in refusing to listen to you?’
+
+‘I cannot argue with you. No doubt you are cleverer than I am. But I
+_know_ this--God is love, and only he who dwelleth in love dwelleth in
+God.’
+
+‘But I do love: I love Ireland.’
+
+‘Ah yes; but He says, “Love your enemies.”’
+
+‘Then,’ said Hyacinth, ‘I will not have Him for my God.’
+
+Hardly had he spoken than he started and grew suddenly cold. It was no
+doubt some trick of memory, but he believed that he heard very faintly
+from far off a remembered voice:
+
+‘Will you be sure to know the good side from the bad, the Captain from
+the enemy.’
+
+They were the last words his father had said to him. They had passed
+unregarded when they were spoken, but lingered unthought of in some
+recess of his memory. Now they came on him full of meaning, insistent
+for an answer.
+
+‘You have chosen,’ said the Canon.
+
+He had chosen. Could he be sure that he had chosen right, that he knew
+the good side from the bad?
+
+‘You have chosen, and I have no more to say. Only, before it becomes
+impossible for you and me to kneel together, I ask you to let me pray
+with you once more. You can do this because you still believe He hears
+us, although you have decided to walk no more with Him.’
+
+They knelt together, and Hyacinth, numbly indifferent, felt his hand
+grasped and held.
+
+‘O Christ,’ said Canon Beecher, ‘this child of Thine has chosen to live
+by hatred rather than by love. Do Thou therefore remove love from him,
+lest it prove a hindrance to him on the way on which he goes. Let the
+memory of the cross be blotted out from his mind, so that he may do
+successfully that which he desires.’
+
+Hyacinth wrenched his hand free from the grasp which held it, and flung
+himself forward across the table at which they knelt. Except for his
+sobs and his choking efforts to subdue them, there was silence in the
+room. Canon Beecher rose from his knees and stood watching him, his lips
+moving with unspoken supplication. At last Hyacinth also rose and stood,
+calm suddenly.
+
+‘You have conquered me,’ he said.
+
+‘My son, my son, this is joy indeed! All along I knew He could not fail
+you. But I have not conquered you. The Lord Jesus has saved you.’
+
+‘I do not know,’ said Hyacinth slowly, ‘whether I have been saved or
+lost. I am not sure even now that I know the good side from the bad.
+But I do know that I cannot live without the hope of being loved by Him.
+Whether it is the better part to which I resign myself I cannot tell.
+No doubt He knows. As for me, if I have been forced to make a great
+betrayal, if I am to live hereafter very basely--and I think I am--at
+least I have not cut myself off from the opportunity of loving Him.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+Canon Beecher took no notice of Hyacinth’s last speech. He had returned
+with amazing swiftness and ease from the region of high emotion to the
+commonplace. Excursions to the shining peaks of mystical experience are
+for most men so rare that the glory leaves them with dazzled eyes, and
+they walk stumblingly for a while along the dull roads of the world.
+But Canon Beecher, in the course of his pleading with Hyacinth, had been
+only in places very well known to him. The presence chamber of the King
+was to him also the room of a familiar friend. It was no breathless
+descent from the green hill of the cross to the thoroughfare of common
+life.
+
+‘Now, my dear boy,’ he said, ‘we really must go and talk to my wife and
+Marion. Besides, I must tell you the plan I have made for you--the plan
+I was just going to speak about when you put it out of my head with the
+news of your love-making.’
+
+For Hyacinth a great effort was necessary before he could get back to
+his normal state. His hands were trembling violently. His forehead and
+hair were damp with sweat. His whole body was intensely cold. His mind
+was confused, and he listened to what was said to him with only the
+vaguest apprehension of its meaning. The Canon laid a firm hand upon
+his arm, and led him away from the study. In the passage he stopped, and
+asked Hyacinth to go back and blow out the candle which still burned on
+the study table.
+
+‘And just put some turf on the fire,’ he added; ‘I don’t want it to go
+out.’
+
+The pause enabled Hyacinth to regain his self-command, and the
+performance of the perfectly ordinary acts required of him helped to
+bring him back again to common life.
+
+When they entered the drawing-room it was evident that Mrs. Beecher had
+already heard the news, and was, in fact, discussing the matter eagerly
+with Marion. She sprang up, and hastened across the room to meet them.
+
+‘I am so glad,’ she said--‘so delighted! I am sure you and Marion will
+be happy together.’
+
+She took Hyacinth’s hands in hers, and held them while she spoke, then
+drew nearer to him and looked up in his face expectantly. A fearful
+suspicion seized him that on an occasion of the kind she might consider
+it right to kiss him. It was with the greatest difficulty that he
+suppressed a wholly unreasonable impulse to laugh aloud. Apparently the
+need of such affectionate stimulant was strong in Mrs. Beecher. When
+Hyacinth hung back, she left him for her husband, put her arms round his
+neck, and kissed him heartily on both cheeks.
+
+‘Isn’t it fortunate,’ she said, ‘that you saw Dr. Henry last week while
+you were in Dublin? You little thought how important that talk with him
+was going to turn out--I mean, of course, important for us. It always
+was important for Mr.--I mean for Hyacinth.’
+
+The Canon seemed a little embarrassed. He cleared his throat somewhat
+unnecessarily, and then said:
+
+‘I haven’t mentioned that matter yet.’
+
+‘Not mentioned Dr. Henry’s offer! Then, what have you been talking about
+all this time?’
+
+It did not seem necessary to tell Mrs. Beecher all that had been said,
+or to repeat the scene in the study for her benefit. The Canon cleared
+his throat again.
+
+‘I was in Dublin last week attending a meeting of the Scriptural Schools
+Society, and I met Dr. Henry. We were talking about the Quinns. I told
+you that Mr. Quinn is to be the new secretary of the society, didn’t I?
+Dr. Henry knows Mr. Quinn slightly, and was greatly interested in him.
+Your name naturally was mentioned. Dr. Henry seems to have taken a
+warm interest in you when you were in college, and to have a very high
+opinion of your abilities. He did not know what had become of you, and
+was very pleased to hear that you were a friend of ours.’
+
+Hyacinth knew at once what was coming--knew what Canon Beecher’s plan
+for his future was, and why he was pleased with it; understood how Mrs.
+Beecher came to describe this conversation with Dr. Henry as fortunate.
+He waited for the rest of the recital, vaguely surprised at his own want
+of feeling.
+
+‘I told him,’ the Canon went on, eying Hyacinth doubtfully, ‘that you
+had lost your employment here. I hope you don’t object to my
+having mentioned that. I am sure you wouldn’t if you had heard how
+sympathetically he spoke of you. He assured me that he was most anxious
+to help you in any way in his power. He just asked one question about
+you.’ Hyacinth started. Where had he heard those identical words before?
+Oh yes, they were in Miss Goold’s letter. Patrick O’Dwyer also had just
+asked one question about him. He smiled faintly as the Canon went on:
+‘“Is he fit, spiritually fit, to be ordained? For it is the desire to
+serve God which must animate our work.” I said I thought you were. I
+told him how you sang in our choir here, and how fond you seemed of our
+quiet life, and what a good fellow you are. You see, I did not know then
+that I was praising the man who is to be my son-in-law. He asked me to
+remind you of a promise he had once made, and to say that he was ready
+to fufil it. I understood him to mean that he would recommend you to any
+Bishop you like for ordination.’
+
+Hyacinth remained silent. He felt that in surrendering his work for the
+_Croppy_ he surrendered also his right to make any choice. He was ready
+to be shepherded into any position, like a sheep into a pen. And he
+had no particular wish to resist. He saw a simple satisfaction in Mrs.
+Beecher’s face and a beautiful joy in Marion’s eyes. It was impossible
+for him to disappoint them. He smiled a response to Mrs. Beecher’s
+kindly triumph.
+
+‘Isn’t that splendid! Now you and Marion will be able to be married
+quite soon, and I do dislike long engagements. Of course, you will be
+very poor at first, but no poorer than we were. And Marion is not afraid
+of being poor--are you, dear?’
+
+‘That is just what I have been saying to him,’ said Marion; ‘isn’t it,
+Hyacinth? Of course I am not afraid. I have always said that if I ever
+married I should like to marry a clergyman, and if one does that one is
+sure to be poor.’
+
+Evidently there was no doubt in either of their minds that Hyacinth
+would accept Dr. Henry’s offer. Nor had he any doubt himself. The thing
+seemed too inevitable to be anything but right. Only on Canon Beecher’s
+face there lingered a shadow of uncertainty. Hyacinth saw it, and
+relieved his mind at once.
+
+‘I shall write to Dr. Henry to-night and thank him. I shall ask him to
+try and get me a curacy as soon as possible.’
+
+‘Thank you,’ said the Canon.
+
+‘I think,’ added Hyacinth, ‘that I should prefer getting work in
+England.’
+
+‘Oh, why,’ said Mrs. Beecher. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to stay in Ireland!
+and then we might have Marion somewhere within reach.’
+
+‘My dear,’ said the Canon, ‘we must let Hyacinth decide for himself. I
+am sure he knows what is wisest for him to do.’
+
+Hyacinth was not at all sure that he knew what was wisest, and he was
+quite certain that he had not decided for himself in any matter of the
+slightest importance. He had suggested an English curacy in the vague
+hope that it might be easier there to forget his hopes and dreams for
+Ireland. It seemed to him, too, that a voluntary exile, of which he
+could not think without pain, might be a kind of atonement for the
+betrayal of his old enthusiasm.
+
+The Canon followed him to the door when he left.
+
+‘My dear boy’--there was a break in his voice as he spoke--’ my dear
+boy, you have made me very happy. I am sure that you will not enter upon
+the work of the ministry from any unworthy motive. The call will become
+clearer to you by degrees. I mean the inward call. The outward call, the
+leading of circumstance, has already made abundantly plain the way you
+ought to walk in. The other will come--the voice which brings assurance
+and peace when it speaks.’
+
+Hyacinth looked at him wistfully. There seemed very little possibility
+of anything like assurance for him, and only such peace as might be
+gained by smothering the cries with which his heart assailed him. The
+Canon held his hand and wrung it.
+
+‘I can understand why you want to go to England. Your political opinions
+will interfere very little with your work there. Here, of course, it
+would be different. Yes, your choice is certainly wise, for nothing
+must be allowed to hinder your work. “Laying aside every weight,” you
+remember, “let us run the race.” Yes, I understand.’
+
+It was perfectly clear to Hyacinth that the Canon did not understand in
+the least. It was not likely that anyone ever would understand.
+
+Gradually his despondency gave way before the crowding in of thoughts of
+satisfaction. He was to have Marion, to live with her, to love her, and
+be loved by her as long as they both lived. He saw life stretching out
+before him, a sunlit, pleasant journey in Marion’s company. It did not
+seem to him that any trouble could be really bad, any disappointment
+intolerable, any toil oppressive with her love for an atmosphere round
+him. He believed, too, that the work he was undertaking was a good work,
+perhaps the highest and noblest kind of work there is to be done in the
+world. From this conviction also came a glow of happiness. Yet there
+kept recurring chill shudderings of self-reproach. Something within him
+kept whispering that he had bartered his soul for happiness.
+
+‘I have chosen the easier and therefore the baser way,’ he said. ‘I have
+shrunk from toil and pain. I have refused to make the sacrifice demanded
+of me.’
+
+He went back again to the story of his father’s vision. For a moment
+it seemed quite clear that he had deliberately refused the call to the
+great fight, that he had judged himself unworthy, being cowardly and
+selfish in his heart. Then he remembered that the Captain of whom his
+father had told him was no one else but Christ, the same Christ of whom
+Canon Beecher spoke, the Good Shepherd whose love he had discovered to
+be the greatest need of all.
+
+‘I must have Him,’ he said--‘I must have Him--and Marion.’
+
+Again with the renewed decision came a glow of happiness and a sense of
+rest, until there rose, as if to smite him, the thought of Ireland--of
+Ireland, poor, derided of strangers, deserted by her sons, roped in as
+a prize-ring where selfish men struggle ignobly for sordid gains. The
+children of the land fled from it sick with despair. Its deserted houses
+were full of all doleful things. Cormorants and the daughters of the owl
+lodged in the lintels of them.
+
+Sullen desolation was on the threshold, while satyrs cried to their
+fellows across tracts of brown rush-grown land. Aliens came to hiss and
+passed by wagging their hands. Over all was the monotony of the gray
+sky, descending and still descending with clouds that came upon the
+land, mistily folding it in close embraces of death. Voices sounded far
+off and unreal through the gloom. The final convulsive struggles of the
+nation’s life grew feebler and fewer. Of all causes Ireland’s seemed the
+most hopelessly lost. Was he, too, going to forsake her? He felt that in
+spite of all the good promised him there would always hang over his life
+a gloom that even Marion’s love would not disperse, the heavy shadow of
+Ireland’s Calvary. For Marion there would be no such darkness, nor would
+Marion understand it. But surely Christ understood. Words of His crowded
+to the memory. ‘When He beheld the city He wept over it, saying,
+Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem!’ Most certainly He understood this, as He
+understood all human emotion. He, too, had yearned over a nation’s fall,
+had felt the heartbreak of the patriot.
+
+‘I have chosen Him,’ he said at last. ‘Once having caught a glimpse of
+Him, I could not do without Him. He understands it all, and He has given
+me Marion.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+It was a brilliant July day, and the convent at Robeen was decked for a
+festival. The occasion was a very great one. Cloth of gold hung in the
+chapel, the entrance-hall was splendid with flowers, and the whole
+white front of the buildings had put on signs of holiday. Indeed,
+this festival was unique, the very greatest day in the history of the
+sisterhood. Easter, Christmas, and the saints’ days recurred annually
+in their proper order, and the emotions they brought with them were no
+doubt familiar to holy ladies whose business it was to live in close
+touch with the other world. But on this day the great of the earth,
+beings much more unapproachable, as a rule, than the saints, were to
+visit the convent. Honour was to be paid to ladies whose magnificence
+was guaranteed by worldly titles; to the Proconsuls of the far-off
+Imperial power, holders of the purse-strings of the richest nation
+upon earth; to Judges accustomed to sit in splendid robes and awful
+head-dresses, pronouncing the doom of malefactors; to a member of the
+Cabinet, a very mighty man, though untitled; and quite possibly--a
+glittering hope--to the Lord Lieutenant himself.
+
+It was therefore no wonder that the nuns had decked their convent
+with all possible splendour. On each side of the iron gateway was a
+flag-post. From the top of one fluttered the green banner of Ireland,
+with its gold harp and a great crown over it. From the other hung
+the Union Jack, emblem of that marriage of nationalities for whose
+consummation eight centuries have not sufficed. It was hoisted upside
+down--not with intentional disrespect, but because Sister Gertrude, who
+superintended this part of the decorations, had long ago renounced the
+world, and did not remember that the tangled crosses had a top or a
+bottom to them. Between the posts hung a festoon of signalling flags,
+long pointed strips of bunting with red balls or blue on them. The
+central streamer just tipped as it fluttered the top of the iron cross
+which marked the religious nature of the gateway. The straight gravel
+walk inside was covered with red baize, and on each side of it were
+planted tapering poles, round which crimson and white muslin circled
+in alternate stripes, giving them the appearance of huge old-fashioned
+sugar-sticks. These added to the gaiety of the scene, though it cannot
+be supposed that they were of any actual use. The most bewildered
+visitor was hardly likely to stray off the red baize or miss his way to
+the door in front of him. Within the great entrance-hall were palms and
+flowering shrubs in pots or tubs. The mosaic flooring, imported from
+Italy, and a source of pride to all the Sisters, shone with much washing
+and polishing. The Madonna with the blue eyes and the golden crown,
+before which even Bishops crossed themselves, was less in evidence than
+usual, for the expected guests were mostly heretics. She stood retired
+behind the flower-pots, and veiled her benignity with the leaves of
+palms.
+
+Right and left of the hall stretched corridors, whose shining parquet
+invited the curious to explore the working-rooms and eating-rooms which
+lay beyond. The door of the chapel stood open, and offered a vision
+of simpering angels crowding the canvas of the altar-piece, a
+justly-admired specimen of German religious art. Before it, dimly
+seen, two nuns knelt, types of conventual piety, absorbed in spiritual
+contemplation amid the tumult of the world’s invasion of their
+sanctuary. Another door led to the garden. Here a fountain played into a
+great stone basin, and neat gravel walks intersected each other at sharp
+angles among flower-beds. The grass which lay around the maze of paths
+was sacred as a rule, even from the list slippers of the nuns, but
+to-day booths stood on it like stalls at a charity bazaar, hung with
+tweeds, blankets, and stockings. A tall Calvary lowered incongruously
+over one. An inferior Madonna, deposed from her old station in the
+entrance-hall, presided in a weather-beaten blue robe over another.
+
+Beyond the garden, blocked off from it by a white wall, lay the factory
+itself, the magnet which was drawing the great of the earth to the
+nunnery. Here were the workers, all of them bright young women, smiling
+pleasantly and well washed for the occasion. They were dressed in neat
+violet petticoats and white blouses, with shawls thrown back from their
+heads, a glorified presentment of the Mayo woman’s working dress. Here
+and there, a touch of realism creditable to the Reverend Mother’s talent
+for stage management, one sat in bare feet--not, of course, dust or mud
+stained, as bare feet are apt to be in Connaught, but clean. The careful
+observer of detail might have been led to suppose that the Sisters
+improved upon the practice of the Holy Father himself, and daily washed
+the feet of the poor.
+
+Everywhere fresh-complexioned, gentle-faced nuns flitted silently about.
+The brass crosses pendent over their breasts relieved with a single
+glitter the sombre folds of their robes. Snowy coifs, which had cost the
+industrial schoolgirls of a sister house hours of labour and many tears,
+shone, glazed and unwrinkled, round their heads. Even the youngest of
+them had acquired the difficult art of walking gracefully with her hands
+folded in front of her.
+
+At about two o’clock the visitors began to arrive, although the train
+from Dublin which was to bring the very elect was not due for another
+half-hour. Lady Geoghegan, grown pleasantly stout and cheerfully
+benignant, came by a local train, and rejoiced the eyes of beholders
+with a dress made of one of the convent tweeds. Sir Gerald followed
+her, awkward and unwilling. He had been dragged with difficulty from his
+books and the society of his children, and was doubtful whether a cigar
+in a nunnery garden might not be counted sacrilege. With them was
+a wonderful person--an English priest: it was thus he described
+himself--whom Lady Geoghegan had met in Yorkshire. His charming manners
+and good Church principles had won her favour and earned him the holiday
+he was enjoying at Clogher House. He was arrayed in a pair of gray
+trousers, a white shirt, and a blazer with the arms of Brazenose College
+embroidered on the pocket, his sacerdotal character being marked only
+by his collar. He leaped gaily from the car which brought them from the
+station, and, as he assisted his hostess to alight, amazed the little
+crowd around the gate by chaffing the driver in an entirely unknown
+tongue. The good man had an ear for music, and plumed himself on his
+ability to pick up any dialect he heard--Scotch, Yorkshire, or Irish
+brogue. The driver was bewildered, but smiled pleasantly. He realized
+that the gentleman was a foreigner, and since the meaning of his speech
+was not clear, it was quite likely that he might be hazy about the value
+of money and the rates of car hire.
+
+The Duchess of Drummin came in her landau. Like Lady Geoghegan, she
+marked the national and industrial nature of the occasion in her attire.
+At much personal inconvenience, for the day was warm, she wore a long
+cloak of rich brown tweed, adorned with rows of large leather-covered
+buttons. Lady Josephine Maguire fluttered after her. She had bidden
+her maid disguise a dress, neither Irish nor homespun, with as much
+Carrickmacross lace as could be attached to it. Lord Eustace, who
+represented his father, appeared in all the glory of a silk hat and a
+frock-coat. He eyed Sir Gerald’s baggy trousers and shabby wideawake
+with contempt, and turned away his eyes from beholding the vanity of
+obviously bad form when he came face to face with the English priest in
+his blazer.
+
+A smiling nun took charge of each party as it arrived. Lady Geoghegan
+plied hers with questions, and received a series of quite uninforming
+answers. Her husband followed her, bent principally upon escaping
+from the precincts if he could. Already he was bored, and he knew that
+speeches from great men were in store for him if he were forced to
+linger. The Duchess of Drummin eyed each object presented to her notice
+gravely through long-handled glasses, but gave her attendant nun very
+little conversational help. Lady Josephine made every effort to be
+intelligent, and inquired in a dormitory where the looking-glasses
+were. She was amazed to hear that the nuns did, or failed to do, their
+hair--the head-dresses concealed the result of their efforts--without
+mirrors. Lord Eustace was preoccupied. Amid his unaccustomed
+surroundings he walked uncertain whether to keep his hat on his head
+or hold it in his hands. The English priest, whose name was Austin, got
+detached from Lady Geoghegan, and picked up a stray nun for himself. She
+took him, by his own request, straight to the chapel. He crossed himself
+with elaborate care on entering, and knelt for a moment before the
+altar. The nun was delighted.
+
+‘So you, too, are a Catholic?’
+
+‘Certainly,’ he replied briskly--‘an English Catholic.’
+
+‘Ah! many of our priests go to England. Perhaps you have met Father
+O’Connell. He is on a London mission.’
+
+‘No,’ said Mr. Austin, ‘I do not happen to have met him. My church is in
+Yorkshire.’
+
+The nun gazed at him in amazement.
+
+‘Your church! Then you are----
+
+‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am a priest.’
+
+Her eyes slowly travelled over him. They began at the gray trousers,
+passed to the blazer, resting a moment on the college arms, which
+certainly suggested the ecclesiastical, and remained fixed on his
+collar. After all, why should she, a humble nun, doubt his word when he
+said he was a priest? Perhaps he might belong to some order of which
+she had never heard. Eccentricities of costume might be forced on the
+English clergy by Protestant intolerance. She smothered her uncertainty,
+and took him at his word. They went together into the garden. Mr. Austin
+took off his hat before the tarnished Madonna, and crossed himself
+again. The nun’s doubts vanished.
+
+‘I think,’ he said, ‘that I should like to buy some of this tweed. Is it
+for sale?’
+
+‘Oh, certainly. Sister Aloysia will sell it to you. We are so glad, so
+very glad, when anyone will buy what our poor workers make. It is all a
+help to the good cause.’
+
+‘Now this,’ said Mr. Austin, fingering a bright-green cloth, ‘would make
+a nice lady’s dress. Don’t you think so?’
+
+The nun cast down her eyes.
+
+‘I do not know, Father, about dresses. Sister Aloysia, the Reverend
+Father wants to buy tweed to make a dress for ‘--she hesitated; perhaps
+it was his niece, but he looked young to have a full-grown niece--‘for
+his sister.’
+
+Sister Aloysia looked round her, puzzled. She saw no Reverend Father.
+
+‘This,’ said the other, ‘is Father--Father----’
+
+‘Austin,’ he helped her out.
+
+‘Father Austin,’ added the nun.
+
+‘And you wish,’ said Sister Aloysia, ‘to buy a dress for your sister?’
+
+‘Not for my sister,’ said Mr. Austin--‘for my wife.’
+
+Both nuns started back as if he had tried to strike them.
+
+‘Your wife! Your wife! Then you are a Protestant.’
+
+‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘I detest all Protestants. I am a Catholic--an
+Anglo-Catholic.’
+
+Neither of the nuns had ever heard of an Anglo-Catholic before.
+What manner of religion such people might profess was doubtful and
+unimportant. One thing was clear--this was not a priest in any sense of
+the word which they could recognise. They distrusted him, as a wolf,
+not certainly in the clothing, but using the language, of a sheep. The
+situation became embarrassing. Mr. Austin prepared to bow himself away.
+
+‘I think,’ he said, ‘I shall ask Lady Geoghegan’--he rolled the title
+out emphatically; it formed a salve to his wounded dignity--‘I shall ask
+Lady Geoghegan to purchase the tweed for me. I must be on the look-out
+for a friend who promised to meet me here this afternoon--a young man
+whom I contemplate engaging as my curate. I am most particular in the
+choice of a curate, and should, of course, prefer a public school
+and ‘Varsity man. I need scarcely say that I refer only to Oxford and
+Cambridge as the Universities. As a rule, I do not care for Irishmen,
+but on the recommendation of my friend Dr. Henry, I am willing to
+consider this Mr. Conneally.’
+
+It seemed to Mr. Austin that a preference for the English Universities,
+the friendship of a distinguished professor, a contempt for the mere
+Irishman, and a titled hostess ought to restore the respect he had
+forfeited by the mention of his wife. Curiously enough, and this shows
+the disadvantage of a monastic seclusion from the world, the nuns
+remained unimpressed. The conception of a married priest was too much
+for them. As he walked away Mr. Austin heard Sister Aloysia murmur:
+
+‘How very indecent!’
+
+Meanwhile, the train from Dublin had arrived, and Mr. Austin, when he
+returned after his interview with Hyacinth, found that even the two nuns
+he had victimized had forgotten him in the excitement of gazing at
+more important visitors. Mr. Justice Saunders, a tall, stout man with a
+florid face, made a tour of the factory under the charge of one of the
+senior Sisters. He took little notice of what he was shown, being
+mainly bent on explaining to his escort how he came to be known in legal
+circles as ‘Satan Saunders.’ Afterwards he added a tale of how he had
+once bluffed a crowd in an out-of-the-way country town into giving three
+cheers for the Queen.
+
+‘You’re all loyal here,’ he said. ‘I saw the Union Jack flying over the
+gate as I came in.’
+
+The nun smiled, a slow, enigmatic smile, and the Judge, watching her,
+was struck by her innocence and simplicity.
+
+‘Surely,’ she said, ‘the Church must always be loyal.’
+
+‘Well, I’m not so sure of that. I’ve met a few firebrands of priests in
+my time.’
+
+‘Oh, those!’ she said with a shrug of her shoulders. ‘You must not think
+of them. It will always be easy to keep them in order when the time
+comes. They spring from the cabins. What can you expect of them? But the
+Church---- Can the Church fail of respect for the Sovereign?’
+
+Mr. Clifford and Mr. Davis followed Judge Saunders. They were members of
+the Congested Districts Board, and it was clear from the manner of
+the nun who escorted them that they were guests of very considerable
+importance in her estimation. Mr. Clifford was an Englishman who had
+been imported to assist in governing Ireland because he was married to
+the sister of the Chief Secretary’s wife. He was otherwise qualified
+for the task by possessing a fair knowledge of the points of a horse. He
+believed that he knew Ireland and the Irish people thoroughly.
+
+His colleague, Mr. Davis, was a man of quite a different stamp. The
+son of a Presbyterian farmer in County Tyrone, he had joined the Irish
+Parliamentary party, and made himself particularly objectionable in
+Westminster. He had devoted his talents to discovering and publishing
+the principles upon which appointments to lucrative posts are made
+by the officials in Dublin Castle. It was found convenient at last to
+provide him with a salary and a seat on the Congested Districts Board.
+Thus he found himself engaged in ameliorating the lot of the Connaught
+peasants. Mr. Clifford used to describe him as ‘a bit of a bounder--in
+fact, a complete outsider--but no fool.’ His estimate of Mr. Clifford
+was perhaps less complimentary.
+
+‘Every business,’ he used to say, ‘must have at least one gentleman in
+it to do the entertaining and the dining out. We have Mr. Clifford. He’s
+a first-rate man at one of the Lord Lieutenant’s balls.’
+
+A professor from Trinity College was one of the two guests conducted by
+the Reverend Mother herself. Nominally this learned gentleman existed
+for the purpose of impressing upon the world the beauties of Latin
+poetry, but he was best known to fame as an orator on the platforms
+of the Primrose League, and a writer of magazine articles on Irish
+questions. He was a man who owed his success in life largely to his
+faculty for always keeping beside the most important person present. The
+Lord Lieutenant, being slightly indisposed, had been unable to make an
+early start, so the most honourable stranger was Mr. Chesney, the Chief
+Secretary. To him Professor Cairns attached himself, and received a
+share of the Reverend Mother’s blandishments.
+
+Mr. Chesney himself was dapper and smiling as usual. Even the early
+hour at which he had been obliged to leave home had neither ruffled his
+temper nor withered the flower in his buttonhole. He spent his money
+generously at the various stalls in the garden, addressed friendly
+remarks to the women in the factory, and asked the questions with which
+Mr. Davis had primed him in the train.
+
+Quite a crowd of minor people followed the great statesman. There were
+barristers who hoped to become County Court Judges, and ladies who
+enjoyed a novel kind of occasion for displaying their clothes, hoping to
+see their names afterwards in the newspaper accounts of the proceedings.
+There were a few foremen from leading Dublin shops, who foresaw the
+possibility of a fashionable boom in Robeen tweeds and flannels. There
+were also reporters from the Dublin papers, and a representative--Miss
+O’Dwyer--of a syndicate which supplied ladies’ journals with accounts of
+the clothes worn at fashionable functions.
+
+The supreme moment of the day arrived when the company assembled to
+listen to words of wisdom from the orators selected to address them.
+Seats had been provided by carting in forms from the neighbouring
+national schools. A handsomely-carved chair of ecclesiastical design
+awaited Mr. Chesney.
+
+He opened his speech by assuring his audience that there was no occasion
+for him to address them at all, a truth which struck home to the heart
+of Sir Gerald, who was trying to arrange himself comfortably at a desk
+designed for a class of infants.
+
+‘Facts,’ Mr. Chesney explained himself, ‘are more eloquent than words.
+You have seen what I could never have described to you--the contented
+workers in this factory and the artistic designs of the fabrics they
+weave. Many of you remember what Robeen was a few years ago--a howling
+wilderness. We are told on high authority that even the wilderness shall
+blossom as a rose.’
+
+He bowed in the direction of the Reverend Mother, possibly with a
+feeling that it was suitable to acknowledge her presence when quoting
+Holy Writ, possibly with a vague idea that she might consider herself
+a spiritual descendant of the Prophet Isaiah. ‘You see it now a hive of
+happy industry.’
+
+He observed with pleasure that the reporters were busy with their
+note-books, and he knew that these editors of public utterance might be
+relied on to unravel a tangled metaphor before publishing a speech. He
+went on light-heartedly, confident that in the next day’s papers his
+wilderness would blossom into something else, and that the hive, if
+it appeared at all, would be arrived at by some other process than
+blossoming. The habit of rolling out agreeable platitudes to audiences
+forced to listen is one which grows on public men as dram-drinking does
+on the common herd. Mr. Chesney was evidently enjoying himself, and
+there seemed no reason why he should ever stop. He could, and perhaps
+would, have gone on for hours but for the offensive way in which Judge
+Saunders snapped the case of his watch at the end of every period. There
+was really no hurry, for the special train which was to bring them back
+to Dublin would certainly wait until they were ready for it. Mr. Chesney
+felt aggrieved at the repeated interruption, and closed his speech
+without giving the audience the benefit of his peroration.
+
+The Judge came next, and began with reminding his hearers that he
+was known as ‘Satan Saunders.’ An account of the origin of the name
+followed, and was enjoyed even by those who had listened to the Judge’s
+oratory before, and therefore knew the story. There was something
+piquant, almost _risqué_, in the constant repetition of a really wicked
+word like ‘Satan’ in the halls of a nunnery. The audience laughed
+reassuringly, and the Judge went on to supply fresh pabulum for mirth by
+suggesting that the Reverend Mother should clothe her nuns in their own
+tweeds. He was probably right in supposing that the new costumes would
+add a gaiety to the religious life. Other jests followed, and he sat
+down amid a flutter of applause after promising that when he next
+presided over the Winter Assizes in a draughty court-house he would send
+for a Robeen blanket and wrap his legs in it.
+
+Mr. Clifford, who followed the Judge, began by wondering whether anyone
+present had ever been in Lancashire. After a pause, during which no one
+owned to having crossed the Channel, he said that Lancashire was the
+home of the modern factory. There every man and woman earned good wages,
+wore excellent clothes, and lived in a house fitted with hot and cold
+water taps and a gas-meter. It was his hope to see Mayo turned into
+another Lancashire. When ladies of undoubted commercial ability, like
+the Lady Abbess who presided over the Robeen convent--Lady Abbess
+sounded well, and Mr. Clifford was not strong on ecclesiastical
+titles--took the matter up, success was assured. All that was required
+for the development of the factory system in Mayo was capital, and that
+‘we, the Congested Districts Board, are in a position to supply.’ With
+the help of some prompting from Mr. Davis, he proceeded to lay
+before the audience a few figures purporting to explain the Board’s
+expenditure.
+
+Professor Cairns was evidently anxious to follow Mr. Clifford, if only
+in the humble capacity of the proposer of a vote of thanks. But his
+name was not on the programme, and Mr. Chesney was already engaged in a
+whispered conversation with the Reverend Mother. Ignoring the professor,
+almost rudely, he announced that the company in general was invited to
+tea in the dining-room.
+
+The refreshments provided, if not substantial, were admirable in
+quality. There happened just then to be a young lady engaged, at the
+expense of the County Council, in teaching cookery in a neighbouring
+convent. She was sent over to Robeen for the occasion, and made a number
+of delightful cakes at extremely small expense. The workers in the
+factory had given the butter she required as a thank-offering, and the
+necessary eggs came from another convent where the nuns, with financial
+assistance from the Congested Districts Board, kept a poultry-farm.
+The Reverend Mother dispensed her hospitality with the same air of
+generosity with which Mr. Clifford had spoken of providing capital for
+the future ecclesiastical factories.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+The Reverend Mother bowed out the last of her guests, and retired to
+her own room well satisfied. She was assured of further support from
+the Congested Districts Board, and certain debts which had grown
+uncomfortably during her struggle with Mr. Quinn need trouble her no
+longer. Her goods would be extensively advertised next morning in the
+daily press. Her house would obtain a celebrity likely to attract
+the most eligible novices--those, that is to say, who would bring the
+largest sums of money as their dowries. There arose before her mind a
+vision of almost unbounded wealth and all that might be done with it.
+What statues of saints might not Italy supply! French painters and
+German organ-builders would compete for the privilege of furnishing the
+chapel of her house. Already she foresaw pavements of gorgeous mosaic,
+windows radiant with Munich glass, and store of vestments to make
+her sacristy famous. Grandiose plans suggested themselves of founding
+daughter houses in Melbourne, in Auckland, in Capetown, in Natal. All
+things were possible to a well-filled purse. She saw how her Order
+might open schools in English towns, where girls could be taught French,
+Italian, Latin, music, all the accomplishments dear to middle-class
+parents, at ridiculously low fees, or without fees at all. She stirred
+involuntarily at the splendour of her visions. The day’s weariness
+dropped off from her. She rose from her chair and went into the chapel.
+She prostrated herself before the altar, and lay passive in a glow of
+warm emotion. For God, for the Mother of God, for the Catholic Church,
+she had laboured and suffered and dared. Now she was well within sight
+of the end, the golden reward, the fulfilment of hopes that had never
+been altogether selfish.
+
+Her thoughts, sanctified now by the Presence on the altar, drifted out
+again on to the shining sea of the future. What she, a humble nun,
+had done others would do. A countless army of missionary men and women
+marching from the Irish shore would conquer the world’s conquerors,
+regain for the Church the Anglo-Saxon race. Once in the far past Irish
+men and women had Christianized Europe, and Ireland had won her glorious
+title, ‘Island of Saints.’ Now the great day was to dawn again, the
+great race to be reborn. For this end had Ireland been kept faithful and
+pure for centuries, just that she might be at last the witness to
+the spiritual in a materialized world. For this end had the Church in
+Ireland gone through the storm of persecution, suffered the blight of
+the world’s contempt, that she might emerge in the end entirely fitted
+for the bloodless warfare.
+
+‘And I am one of the race, a daughter of Ireland. And I am a
+worker--nay, one who has accomplished something--in the vineyard of the
+Church. Ah, God!’
+
+She was swept forward on a wave of emotion. Thought ceased, expiring
+in the ecstasy of a communion which transcended thought. Then suddenly,
+sharp as an unexpected pain, an accusation shot across her soul,
+shattering the coloured glory of the trance in an instant.
+
+‘Who am I that I should boast?’
+
+The long years of introspection, the discipline of hundreds of
+heart-searching confessions, the hardly-learned lesson of self-distrust,
+made it possible for her to recognise the vain-glory even with the halo
+of devotion shining round it. She abased herself in penitence.
+
+‘Give me the work, my Lord; give others the glory and the fruit of it.
+Let me toil, but withhold the reward from me. May my eyes not see it,
+lest I be lifted up! Nay, give me not even work to do, lest I should be
+praised or learn to praise myself. “Nunc dimittis servam tuam, Domine,
+secundum verbum tuum in pace.”’
+
+There stole over her a sense of peace--numb, silent peace--wholly unlike
+the satisfaction which had flooded her in her own room or during the
+earlier ecstasy before the altar. She raised her eyes slowly till they
+rested on the shrine where the body of the sacrifice reposed.
+
+‘Quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum.’
+
+At last she rose. The lines of care and age gathered again upon her
+face. Her eyes gleamed with keen intelligence. She braced herself with
+the thought of all that might still lie before her. The advice of Iago,
+strangely sanctified, clamoured in her heart--‘Put money in thy purse.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+The Reverend Mother was not the only person well satisfied with the
+day. The Right Hon. T. J. Chesney leant back in his saloon-carriage,
+and puffed contentedly at his cigar. It might be his part
+occasionally--indeed, frequently--to talk like a fool, but the man was
+shrewd enough. It really seemed that he had hit on the true method of
+governing Ireland. Nationalist members of Parliament could be muzzled,
+not by the foolish old methods of coercion, but by winning the goodwill
+of the Bishops. No Irish member dared open his mouth when a priest
+bid him keep it shut, or give a vote contrary to the wishes of the
+hierarchy. And the Bishops were reasonable men. They looked at things
+from a point of view intelligible to Englishmen. There was no ridiculous
+sentimentality about their demands. For so much money they would silence
+the clamour of the Parliamentary party; for so much more they would
+preach a modified loyalty, would assert before the world that the Irish
+people were faithful servants of the Sovereign; for a good lump sum down
+they would undertake to play ‘God Save the King’ or ‘Rule, Britannia’
+on the organ at Maynooth. Of course, the money must be paid: Mr. Chesney
+was beginning to understand that, and felt the drawback. It would have
+been much pleasanter and simpler if the Bishops would have been content
+with promises. There was a certain difficulty in obtaining the necessary
+funds without announcing precisely what they were for. But, after all,
+a man cannot be called a great statesman without doing something to
+deserve the title, and British statesmanship is the art of hoodwinking
+the taxpayer. That is all--not too difficult a task for a clever man.
+Mr. Chesney reckoned on no power in Ireland likely to be seriously
+troublesome. The upper classes were either helpless and sulking, or
+helpless and smiling artificially. They might grumble in private or
+try to make themselves popular by joining the chorus of the Church’s
+flatterers. Either way their influence was inconsiderable. Was there
+anyone else worth considering? The Orangemen were still a noisy faction,
+but their organization appeared to be breaking up. They were more bent
+on devouring their own leaders than interfering with him. There were a
+number of people anxious to revive the Irish language, who at one time
+had caused him some little uneasiness. He had found it quite impossible
+to understand the Gaelic League, and, being an Englishman, arrived
+gradually at the comfortable conclusion that what he could not
+understand must be foolish. Now, he had great hopes that the Bishops
+might capture the movement.
+
+If once it was safely under the patronage of the Church, he had
+nothing more to fear from it. No doubt, resolutions would be passed,
+but resolutions------ Mr. Chesney smiled. There were, of course, the
+impossible people connected with the _Croppy_. Mr. Chesney did not like
+them, and in the bottom of his heart was a little nervous about them.
+They seemed to be very little afraid of the authority of the Church,
+and he doubted if the authority of the state would frighten them at
+all. Still, there were very few of them, and their abominable spirit of
+independence was spreading slowly, if at all.
+
+‘They won’t,’ he said to himself, ‘be of any importance for some years
+to come, at all events, and five years hence----’
+
+In five years Mr. Chesney hoped to be Prime Minister, or perhaps to
+have migrated to the House of Lords, At least, he expected to be out
+of Ireland, Meanwhile, he lighted a fresh cigar. The condition of the
+country was extremely satisfactory, and his policy was working out
+better than he had hoped.
+
+The other travellers by the special train were equally well pleased,
+Ireland, so they understood Mr. Chesney, was to be made happy and
+contented, peaceful and prosperous. It followed that there must be
+Boards under the control of Dublin Castle--more and more Boards, an
+endless procession of them. There is no way devised by the wit of man
+for securing prosperity and contentment except the creation of Boards.
+If Boards, then necessarily officials--officials with salaries and
+travelling allowances. Nice gentlemanly men, with villas at Dalkey and
+Killiney, would perform duties not too arduous in connection with the
+Boards, and carry out the benevolent policy of the Government. There
+was not a man in the train, except the newspaper reporters, who did not
+believe in the regeneration of Ireland by Boards, and everyone hoped to
+take a share in the good work, with the prospect of a retiring pension
+afterwards.
+
+The local magnates--with the exception of Sir Gerald Geoghegan, whose
+temper had been bad from the first--also went home content. The minds of
+great ladies work somewhat confusedly, for Providence, no doubt wisely,
+has denied to most of them the faculty of reason. It was enough for them
+to feel that the nuns were ‘sweet women,’ and that in some way not very
+clear Mr. Chesney was getting the better of ‘those wretched agitators.’
+
+Only one of all whom the special train had brought down failed to return
+in it. Mary O’Dwyer slipped out of the convent before the speeches
+began, and wandered away towards the desolate stony hill where the
+stream which turns the factory mill took its rise. It grieved her to
+miss the cup of tea which a friendly nun had led her to expect; but even
+tea might be too dearly purchased, and Miss O’Dwyer had a strong dislike
+to listening to what Augusta Goold described as the ‘sugared hypocrisies
+of professional liars.’ Besides, she had her cigarette-case in her
+pocket, and a smoke, unattainable for her in the convent or the train,
+was much to be desired. She left the road at the foot of the hill, and
+picked her way along the rough bohireen which led upwards along the
+course of the stream. After awhile even this track disappeared. The
+stream tumbled noisily over rocks and stones, the bog-stained water
+glowing auburn-coloured in the sunlight. The ling and heather were
+springy under her feet, and the air was sweet with the scent of the
+bog-myrtle. She spied round her for a rock which cast a shade upon the
+kind of heathery bed she had set her heart to find. Her eyes lit upon
+a little party--a young man and two girls--encamped with a kettle, a
+spirit-stove, and a store of bread-and-butter. Her renunciation of the
+convent tea had not been made without a pang. She looked longingly at
+the steam which already spouted from the kettle. The young man said
+a few words to the girls, then stood up, raised his hat to her, and
+beckoned. She approached him, wondering.
+
+‘Surely it can’t be--I really believe it is----’
+
+‘Yes, Miss O’Dwyer, it really is myself, Hyacinth Conneally.’
+
+‘My dear boy, you are the last person I expected to meet, though of
+course I knew you were somewhere down in these parts.’
+
+‘Come and have some tea,’ said Hyacinth. ‘And let me introduce you to
+Miss Beecher and Miss Elsie Beecher.’
+
+Miss O’Dwyer took stock of the two girls. ‘They make their own clothes,’
+she thought, ‘and apparently only see last year’s fashion-plates. The
+eldest isn’t bad-looking. How is it all West of Ireland girls have such
+glorious complexions? Her figure wouldn’t be bad if her mother bought
+her a decent pair of stays. I wonder who they are, and what they are
+doing here with Hyacinth. They can’t be his sisters.’
+
+While they drank their tea certain glances and smiles gave her an
+inkling of the truth. ‘I suppose Hyacinth is engaged to the elder one,’
+she concluded. ‘That kind of girl wouldn’t dare to make eyes at a man
+unless she had some kind of right to him.’
+
+After tea she produced her cigarette-case.
+
+‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said to Marion. ‘I know it’s very shocking,
+but I’ve had a tiring day and an excellent tea, and oh, this heather is
+delicious to lie on!’ She stretched herself at full length as she spoke.
+‘I really must smoke, just to arrive at perfect felicity for once in my
+life. How happy you people ought to be who always have in a place like
+this!’
+
+‘Oh,’ said Marion, ‘it sometimes rains, you know.’
+
+‘Ah! and then these sweet spots get boggy, I suppose, and you have to
+wear thick, clumping boots.’
+
+Her own were very neat and small, and she knew that they must obtrude
+themselves on the eye while she lay prone. Elsie, whose shoes were
+patched as well as thick-soled, made an ineffectual attempt to cover
+them with her skirt.
+
+‘Now,’ said Hyacinth, ‘tell us what you are doing down here. They
+haven’t made you an inspectress of boarded-out workhouse children, have
+they? or sent you down to improve the breed of hens?’
+
+‘No,’ said Miss O’Dwyer; ‘I have spent the afternoon helping to govern
+Ireland.’
+
+Marion and Elsie gazed at her in wonder. A lady who smoked cigarettes
+and bore the cares of State upon her shoulders was a novelty to them.
+
+‘I have sat in the seats of the mighty,’ she said; ‘I have breathed the
+same air as Mr. Chesney and two members of the C.D.B. Think of that!
+Moreover, I might, if I liked, have drunk tea with a Duchess.’
+
+‘Oh,’ said Hyacinth, ‘you were at the convent function, I suppose. I
+wonder I didn’t see you.’
+
+‘What on earth were _you_ doing there? I thought you hated the nuns and
+all their ways.’
+
+‘Go on about yourself,’ said Hyacinth. ‘You are not employed by the
+Government to inspect infant industries, are you?’
+
+‘Oh no; I was one of the representatives of the press. I have notes here
+of all the beautiful clothes worn by the wives and daughters of the West
+British aristocracy. Listen to this: “Lady Geoghegan was gowned in an
+important creation of saffron tweed, the product of the convent looms.
+We are much mistaken if this fabric in just this shade is not destined
+to play a part in robing the _élégantes_ who will shed a lustre on our
+house-parties during the autumn.” And this--you must just listen to
+this.’
+
+‘I won’t,’ said Hyacinth; ‘you can if you like, Marion. I’ll shut my
+ears.’
+
+‘Very well,’ said Miss O’Dwyer; ‘I’ll talk seriously. When are you
+coming up to Dublin? You know my brother has taken over the editorship
+of the _Croppy_. We are going to make it a great power in the country.
+We are coming out with a policy which will sweep the old set of
+political talkers out of existence, and clear the country of Mr. Chesney
+and the likes of him.’ She waved her hand towards the convent. ‘Oh, it
+is going to be great. It is great already. Why don’t you come and help
+us?’
+
+Hyacinth looked at her. She had half risen and leaned upon her elbow.
+Her face was flushed and her eyes sparkled. There was no doubt about
+the genuineness of her enthusiasm. The words of her poem, long since, he
+supposed, blotted from his memory, suddenly returned to him:
+
+           ‘O, desolate mother, O, Erin,
+     When shall the pulse of thy life which but flutters in Connacht
+     Throb through thy meadows and boglands and mountains and cities?’
+
+Had it come at last, this revival of the nation’s vitality? Had it come
+just too late for him to share it?
+
+‘I shall not help you,’ he said sadly; ‘I do not suppose that I ever
+could have helped you much, but now I shall not even try.’
+
+She looked at him quickly with a startled expression in her eyes. Then
+she turned to Marion.
+
+‘Are you preventing him?’ she said.
+
+‘No,’ said Hyacinth; ‘it is not Marion. But I am going away--going to
+England. I am going to be ordained, to become an English curate. Do you
+understand? I came here to-day to see the man who is to be my Rector,
+and to make final arrangements with him.’
+
+‘Oh, Hyacinth!’
+
+For some minutes she said no more. He saw in her face a wondering
+sorrow, a pathetic submissiveness to an unexpected disappointment, like
+the look in the face of a dog struck suddenly by the hand of a friend.
+He felt that he could have borne her anger better. No doubt if he had
+made his confession to Augusta Goold he would have been overwhelmed with
+passionate wrath or withered by a superb contemptuous stare. Then he
+could have worked himself to anger in return. But this!
+
+‘You will never speak to any of us again,’ she went on. You will be
+ashamed even to read the _Croppy_. You will wear a long black coat and
+gray gloves. You will learn to talk about the “Irish Problem” and the
+inestimable advantages of belonging to a world-wide Empire, and about
+the great heart of the English people. I see it all--all that will
+happen to you. Your hair will get quite smooth and sleek. Then you will
+become a Vicar of a parish. You will live in a beautiful house, with
+Virginia creeper growing over it and plum-trees in the garden. You will
+have a nice clean village for a parish, with old women who drop curtsies
+to you, and men--such men! stupid as bullocks! I know it all. And you
+will be ashamed to call yourself an Irishman. Oh, Hyacinth!’
+
+Miss O’Dwyer’s catalogue of catastrophes was curiously mixed. Perhaps
+the comedy in it tended to obscure the utter degradation of the ruin
+she described. But the freakish incongruity of the speech did not strike
+Hyacinth. He found in it only two notes--pity that such a fate awaited
+him, and contempt for the man who submitted to it.
+
+‘I cannot help myself. Will you not make an effort to understand? I am
+trying to do what is right.’
+
+She shook her head.
+
+‘No,’ he said, ‘I know it is no use. You could not understand even if I
+told you all I felt.’
+
+Her eyes filled suddenly with tears. He heard her sob. Then she turned
+without a word and left them. He stood watching her till she reached
+the road and started on her walk to the railway-station. Then he took
+Marion’s two hands in his, and held them fast.
+
+‘Will _you_ understand?’ he asked her.
+
+She looked up at him. Her face was all tenderness. Love shone on
+him--trusting, unquestioning, adoring love, love that would be loyal to
+the uttermost; but her eyes were full of a dumb wonder.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+One morning near the end of September the _Irish Times_ published a list
+of Irish graduates ordained in England on the previous Sunday. Among
+other names appeared:
+
+‘Hyacinth Conneally, B.A., T.C.D., deacon, by the Bishop of Ripon, for
+the curacy of Kirby-Stowell.’
+
+Shortly afterwards the _Croppy_ printed the following verses, signed
+‘M.O’D.’:
+
+                 ‘EIRE TO H. C.
+
+     ‘Bight across the low, flat curragh from the sea,
+     Drifting, driving sweeps the rain,
+     Where the bogborn, bent, brown rushes grow for me,
+     Barren grass instead of grain.
+
+     ‘Out across the sad, soaked curragh towards the sea,
+     Striding, striving go the men,
+     With their spades and forks and barrows toil for me
+     That my corn may grow again
+
+     ‘Ah! but safe from blast of wind and bitter sea,
+     You who loved me---Tusa féin--
+     Live and feel and work for others, not for me,
+     Never coming back again.
+
+     ‘Yes, while all across the curragh from the West
+     Drifts the sea-rain off the sea,
+     You have chosen. Have you chosen what is best
+     For yourself, O son, and me?’
+
+Hyacinth read the verses, cut them out of the _Croppy_, and locked them
+in the box in which he stored the few papers of interest he possessed.
+The sorrowful judgment pronounced on his conduct affected him, but only
+in a dull way, like an additional blow upon a limb already bruised to
+numbness. He accepted his new duties and performed them without any
+feeling of enthusiasm, and after a little while without any definite
+hope of doing any good. He got no further in understanding the people he
+had to deal with, and he was aware that even those of them who came most
+frequently into contact with him regarded him as a stranger. A young
+doctor whose wife took a fancy to Marion tried to make friends with him.
+The result was unsatisfactory, owing to Hyacinth’s irresponsiveness. He
+could not, without yawning piteously, spend an evening discussing the
+performances of the local cricket club; nor did his conduct improve when
+the two ladies suspended their talk and sacrificed an hour to playing
+four-handed halma with their husbands. An unmarried solicitor, attracted
+by Marion’s beauty and friendliness, adopted the habit of calling at
+Hyacinth’s little house about nine or ten o’clock in the evening. He
+was a man full of anecdote and simple mirth, and he often stayed, quite
+happily, till midnight. Every week he brought an illustrated paper as
+an offering to Marion, and recommended the short stories in it to
+her notice. He often asked Hyacinth’s advice and help in solving the
+conundrums set by the prize editor. He took a mild interest in politics,
+and retailed gossip picked up at the Conservative Club. After a while he
+gave up coming to the house. Hyacinth blamed himself for being cold and
+unfriendly to the man.
+
+Mr. Austin treated Hyacinth with kindness and some consideration, much
+as a wise master treats an upper servant. He was anxious that his curate
+should perform many and complicated ceremonies in church, was seriously
+intent on the wearing of correctly-coloured stoles, and ‘ran,’ as he
+expressed it himself, a very large number of different organizations, of
+each of which the objective appeared to be a tea-party in the parochial
+hall. Hyacinth accepted his tuition, bowed low at the times when Mr.
+Austin liked to bow, watched for the seasons when stoles bloomed white
+and gold, changed to green, or faded down to violet. He tried to
+make himself agreeable to the ‘united mothers’ and the rest when they
+assembled for tea-drinking. Mr. Austin asserted that these were the
+methods by which the English people were being taught the Catholic
+faith. Hyacinth did not doubt it, nor did he permit himself to wonder
+whether it was worth while teaching them.
+
+To Marion the new life was full of many delights. The surpliced
+choir-boys gratified her aesthetic sense, and she entered herself as one
+of a band of volunteers who scrubbed the chancel tiles and polished a
+brass cross. She smiled, kissed, and petted Hyacinth out of the fits of
+depression which came on him, managed his small income with wonderful
+skill, and wrote immensely long letters home to Ballymoy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+It is very hard for a poor man to travel from one side of England to the
+other side of Ireland, because railway companies, even when, to allure
+the public, they advertise extraordinary excursions, charge a great
+deal for their tickets. The journey becomes still more difficult of
+accomplishment when the poor man is married. Then there are two tickets
+to be bought, and very likely most of the money which might have bought
+them has been spent securing the safe arrival of a baby--a third person
+who in due time will also require a railway-ticket. This was Hyacinth’s
+case. For two summers he had no holiday at all, and it was only by the
+most fortunate of chances that he found himself during the third
+summer in a position to go to Ballymoy. He sublet his house to a
+freshly-arrived supervisor of Inland Revenue, who wanted six weeks
+to look about for a suitable residence. With the nine pounds paid in
+advance by this gentleman, Hyacinth and Marion, having with them their
+baby, a perambulator, and much other luggage, set off for Ballymoy.
+
+The journey is not a very pleasant one, because it is made over the
+lines of three English railway companies, whose trains refuse to connect
+with each other at junctions, and because St. George’s Channel is
+generally rough. The discomfort of third-class carriages is more acutely
+felt when the Irish shore is reached, but the misery of having to feed
+and tend a year-old child lasts the whole journey through. Therefore,
+Marion arrived in Dublin dishevelled, weary, and, for all her natural
+placidness, inclined to be cross. The steamer came to port at an hour
+which left them just the faint hope of catching the earliest train to
+Ballymoy. Disappointment followed the nervous strain of a rush across
+Dublin. Two long hours intervened before the next train started, and the
+people who keep the refreshment-room in Broadstone Station are not early
+risers. Marion, without tea or courage, settled herself and the baby in
+the draughty waiting-room.
+
+Hyacinth was also dishevelled, dirty, and tired, having borne his full
+share of strife with the child’s worst moods. But the sight of Ireland
+from the steamer’s deck filled him with a strange sense of exultation.
+He wished to shout with gladness when the gray dome of the Custom House
+rose to view, immense above the low blanket of mist. Even the incredibly
+hideous iron grating of the railway viaduct set his pulse beating
+joyfully. He drew deep breaths, inhaling various abominable smells
+delightedly. The voices of the sleepy porters on the quay roused in him
+a craving for the gentle slovenliness of Irish speech. He fussed and
+hustled Marion beyond the limits of her endurance, pretending eagerness
+to catch the early train, caring in reality not at all whether any train
+were caught or missed, filled only with a kind of frenzy to keep moving
+somehow further into Ireland. In the cab he gave utterance to ridiculous
+pleasantries. He seized the child from Marion, and held him, wailing
+piteously, half out of the window, that his eyes might rest on the great
+gilt characters which adorn the offices of the Gaelic League. It was
+with rapture that he read Irish names, written and spelt in Irish, above
+the shops, and saw a banner proclaiming the annual festival of Irish
+Ireland hanging over the door of the Rotunda. The city had grown more
+Irish since he left it. There was no possibility now, even in the early
+morning, with few people but scavengers and milkmen in the streets, of
+mistaking for an English town.
+
+While Marion sat torpid in the waiting-room, he paced the platform
+eagerly from end to end. He saw the train pushed slowly into position
+beside the platform, watched porters sweep the accumulated débris of
+yesterday’s traffic from the floors of the carriages, and rub with
+filthy rags the brass doorhandles. Little groups of passengers began to
+arrive--first a company of cattle-jobbers, four of them, red-faced men
+with keen, crafty eyes, bound for some Western fair; then a laughing
+party of tourists, women in short skirts and exaggeratedly protective
+veils, men with fierce tweed knickerbockers dragging stuffed hold-alls
+and yellow bags. These were evidently English. Their clear high-pitched
+voices proclaimed contempt for their surroundings, and left no doubt of
+their nationality. One of them addressed a bewildered porter in cheerful
+song:
+
+     ‘Are you right there,
+     Michael? are you right?
+     Have you got the parcel there for Mrs. White?’
+
+He felt, and his companions sympathized, that he was entering into the
+spirit of Irish life. Then, heralded by an obsequious guard, came a
+great man, proconsular in mien and gait. Bags and rugs were wheeled
+beside him. In his hand was a despatch-box bearing the tremendous
+initials of the Local Government Board. He took complete possession of
+a first-class smoking carriage, scribbled a telegram, perhaps of
+international importance, handed it to the guard for instant despatch,
+and lit a finely-odorous cigar. Hyacinth, humbled by the mere view of
+this incarnation of the Imperial spirit, went meekly to the waiting-room
+to fetch Marion and his child. He led them across the now crowded
+platform towards a third-class carriage.
+
+‘I will not go with you in your first-class carriage, Father Lavelle; so
+that’s flat. Nor I won’t split the difference and go second either, if
+that’s what you’re going to propose to me. Is it spend what would keep
+the family of a poor man in bread and tea for a week, for the sake of
+easing my back with a cushion? Get away with you. The plain deal board’s
+good enough for me. And, moreover, I doubt very much if I’ve the money
+to do it, if I were ever so willing. I’m afraid to look into my purse to
+count the few coppers that’s left in it after paying that murdering bill
+in the hotel you took me to. Gresham, indeed! A place where they’re
+not ashamed to charge a poor old priest three and sixpence for his
+breakfast, and me not able to eat the half of what they put before me.’
+
+Hyacinth turned quickly. Two priests stood together near the bookstall.
+The one, a young man, handsome and well-dressed, he did not know. The
+other he recognised at once. It seemed to be the same familiarly shabby
+black coat which he wore, the same many-stained waistcoat, the identical
+silk hat, ruffled and rain-spotted. The same pads of flesh hung flaccid
+from his jaws; the red, cracked knuckles of his hands, well remembered,
+were enormous still. Only the furrows on the face seemed to be ploughed
+deeper and wider, and a few more stiff hairs curled over the general
+bushiness of the grizzled eyebrows.
+
+‘Father Moran!’ cried Hyacinth.
+
+‘I am Father Moran. You’re right there. But who _you_ are or how you
+come to know me is more than I can tell. But wait a minute. I’ve a sort
+of recollection of your voice. Will you speak to me again, and maybe
+I’ll be able to put a name on you.’
+
+Hyacinth said a few words rapidly in Irish.
+
+‘I have you now,’ said the priest. ‘You’re Hyacinth Conneally, the boy
+that went out to fight for the Boers. Father Lavelle, this is a friend
+of mine that I’ve known ever since he was born, and I haven’t laid eyes
+on him these six years or more. You’re going West, Mr. Conneally? But of
+course you are. Where else would you be going? We’ll travel together
+and talk. If it’s second-class you’re going, Father Lavelle will have
+to lend me the money to pay the extra on my ticket, so as I can go with
+you. Seemingly it’s a Protestant minister you’ve grown into. Well
+now, who’d have thought it? And you so set on fighting the battle of
+Armageddon and all. It’s a come-down for you, so it is. But never mind.
+You might have got yourself killed in it. There’s many a one killed or
+maimed for life in smaller fights than it. It’s better to be a minister
+any day than a corpse or a cripple. And as you are a minister, it’s
+likely to be third-class you’re travelling. Times are changed since
+I was young. It was the priests travelled third-class then, if they
+travelled at all, and the ministers were cocked up on the cushions,
+looking down on the likes of us out of the windows with the little red
+curtains half-drawn across them. Now it’ll be Father Lavelle there,
+with his grand new coat that he says is Irish manufacture--but I
+don’t believe him--who’ll be doing the gentleman. But come along, Mr.
+Conneally--come along, and tell me all the battles you fought and the
+Generals you made prisoners of, and how it was you took to preaching
+afterwards.’
+
+Hyacinth, somewhat shyly, introduced the priest to Marion. Then a
+ticket-collector drove them into their carriage and locked the door.
+
+Father Moran began to catechize Hyacinth before the train started, and
+drew from him, as they went westwards, the story of his disappointments,
+doubts, hopes, veerings, and final despair. Hyacinth spoke unwillingly
+at first, giving no more than necessary answers to the questions.
+Then, because he found that reticence called down on him fresh and
+more detailed inquiries, and also because the priest’s evident and
+sympathetic interest redeemed a prying curiosity from offensiveness,
+he told his tale more freely. Very soon there was no more need of
+questioning, and Father Moran’s share in the talk took the form of
+comments interrupting a narrative.
+
+Of Captain Albert Quinn he said:
+
+‘I’ve heard of him, and a nice kind of a boy he seems to have been. I
+suppose he fought when he got there. He’s just the sort that would be
+splendid at the fighting. Well, God is good, and I suppose it’s to
+do the fighting for the rest of us that He makes the likes of Captain
+Quinn. Did you hear that they wanted to make him a member of Parliament?
+Well, they did. Nothing less would please them. But what good would
+that be, when he couldn’t set foot in the country for fear of being
+arrested?’
+
+Later on he was moved to laughter.
+
+‘To think of your going on the road with a bag full of blankets and
+shawls! I never heard of such a thing, and all the grand notions your
+head was full of! Why didn’t you come my way? I’d have made Rafferty
+give you an order. I’d have bought the makings of a frieze coat from you
+myself--I would, indeed.’
+
+Afterwards he became grave again.
+
+‘I won’t let you say the hard word about the nuns, Mr. Conneally. Don’t
+do it, now. There’s plenty of good convents up and down through the
+country--more than ever you’ll know of, being the black Protestant you
+are. And the ones that ruined your business--supposing they did ruin
+it, and I’ve only your word for that--what right have you to be blaming
+them? They were trying to turn an honest penny by an honest trade, and
+that’s just what you and your friend Mr. Quinn were doing yourselves.’
+
+Hyacinth, conscious of a failure in good taste, shifted his ground, only
+to be interrupted again.
+
+‘Oh, you may abuse the Congested Districts Board to your heart’s
+content. I never could see what the Government made all the Boards for
+unless it was to keep the people out of mischief. As long as there is
+a Board of any kind about the country every blackguard will be so busy
+throwing stones at it that he won’t have time nor inclination left
+to annoy decent people. And I’ll say this for the Congested Districts
+Board: they mean well. Indeed they do; not a doubt of it. There’s one
+good thing they did, anyway, if there isn’t another, and that’s when
+they came to Carrowkeel and bought the big Curragh Farm that never
+supported a Christian, but two herds and some bullocks ever since the
+famine clearances. They fetched the people down off the mountains and
+put them on it. Wasn’t that a good thing, now? Sure, all Government
+Boards do more wrong than right. It’s the nature of that sort of
+confederation. But it’s all the more thankful we ought to be when once
+in a while they do something useful.’
+
+Hyacinth came to tell of the choice which Canon Beecher offered him, and
+dwelt with tragic emphasis on his own decision. The priest listened, a
+smile on his lips, a look of pity which belied the smile in his eyes.
+
+‘So you thought Ireland would be lost altogether unless you wrote
+articles for Miss Goold in the _Croppy?_ It’s no small opinion you have
+of yourself, Hyacinth Conneally. And you thought you’d save your soul by
+going to preach the Gospel to the English people? Was that it, now?’
+
+‘It was not,’ said Hyacinth, ‘and you know it wasn’t.’
+
+‘Of course it wasn’t. What was I thinking of to forget the young lady
+that was in it? A fine wife you’ve got, any way. God bless her, and make
+you a good husband to her! By the looks of her she’s better than you
+deserve. I suppose it was to get money you went to England, so as to buy
+her pretty dresses and a beautiful house to live in? Did you think you’d
+grow rich over there?’
+
+‘Indeed I did not,’ said Hyacinth bitterly. ‘I knew we’d never be rich.’
+
+‘Well, then, couldn’t you as well have been poor in Ireland? And better,
+for everybody’s poor here. But there, I know well enough it wasn’t money
+you were after. Don’t be getting angry with me, now. It wasn’t for the
+sake of saving your soul you went, nor to get your nice wife, though a
+man might go a long way for the likes of her. I don’t know why you went,
+and it’s my belief you don’t know yourself. But you made a mistake,
+whatever you did it for, going off on that English mission. Is it a
+mission you call it when you’re a Protestant? I don’t think it is, but
+it doesn’t matter. You made a mistake. Why don’t you come back again?’
+
+‘God knows I would if I could. It’s hungry I am to get back--just sick
+with hunger and the great desire that is on me to be back again in
+Ireland.’
+
+‘Well, what’s to hinder you? Let me tell you this: There’s been four
+men in your father’s place since he died. Never a one of the first three
+would stay. They tell me the pay’s small, and the place is desolate to
+them for the want of Protestants, there being none, you may say, but the
+coastguards. After the third of them left it was long enough before they
+got the fourth. I hear they went scouring and scraping round the four
+coasts of the country with a trawl-net trying to get a man. And now
+they’ve got him he’s all for going away. He says there’s no work to do,
+and no people to preach to. But you’d find work, if you were there. I’d
+find you work myself--work for the people you knew since you were born,
+that’s in the way at last of getting to be the men and women they were
+meant to be, and that wants all the help can be got for them. Why don’t
+you come back?’
+
+‘Indeed, Father Moran, I would if I could.’ ‘If you could! What’s the
+use of talking? Isn’t your wife’s father a Canon? And wouldn’t that
+professor in the college that you used to tell me of do something for
+you? What’s the good of having fine friends like that if they won’t get
+you sent to a place like Carrowkeel, that never another minister but
+yourself would as much as eat his dinner in twice if he could help it?’
+
+Hyacinth glanced doubtfully at Marion. The child lay quiet in her arms.
+She slept uncomfortably. It was clear that she had not cared to listen
+to the conversation of the two men.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Hyacinth, by George A. Birmingham
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