CHAPTER XVII.
THE DOOMED NATION.
A passion of anger and despair swept over Ireland when it was at last announced that Crowe had sold the pass. For some days the people were in the same dazed and helpless condition of mind that followed the potato blight of '46. In that terrible year one of the strange and most universally observed phenomena was that the people looked, for days after the advent of the blight that brought the certainty of hunger and death, silent and motionless and apathetic. And so it was now, when there came a blight, less quickly, but as surely, destructive of national life and hope. There was a dread presentiment that this was a blow from which the nation was not destined to recover for many a long day, and though they could not reason about it, the people had the instinctive feeling that the rule of the landlord was now fixed more tightly than ever, and that emancipation was postponed to a day beyond that of the present generation.
The landlords appreciated the situation with the same instinctive readiness and perception. At once the pause which had come in the work of eviction was broken, the plague raged immediately with a fierceness that seemed to have gained more hellish energy and more devilish cruelty from its temporary abatement. The roads were thick with troops of people rushing wildly from their homes and fleeing from their native country as from a land cursed alike by God and by man. Mat Blake, passing along from Dublin to Ballybay, was almost driven to insanity by the sights he saw at the different sections along the way.
Every station was besieged by vast crowds of the emigrants and their friends. There are few sights so touching as the sight of the parting of Irish families at a railway station. The ties of family are closer and more affectionate than anybody can appreciate who has not lived the life of an Irish home. The children grow up in a dependence on their parents that may well seem slavery to other peoples. The grown son is still the "boy" years after he has attained manhood's years, the daughter remains a little girl, whom her mother has the right to chide and direct and control in every action. Such ties beget helplessness as well as affection, and the Irish peasant still regards many things as worse than death, which, by peoples of less ardent religious faith, are regarded more philosophically.
When Mat looked at the simple faces of those poor girls, at the bewildered look in the countenances of the young men, and thought of how ignorant and helpless these people were, he could understand the almost insane anguish of their parents as they saw them embark on an ocean so dark and tempestuous and remote as the crowded cities of America, and Mat could penetrate down into the minds of his people and see with the lightning flash of sympathy the dread spectre that tortured the minds, filled the eyes, and darkened the brows of the Irish parents.
Station after station, it was always the same sight. The parting relatives were locked in each other's arms; they wept and cried aloud, and swayed in their grief.
"Cheer up, father; God is good."
"Ah, Paddie, my darlint, I'll never see ye agin."
"Oh mother, dear, don't fret."
"May God and His Blessed Mother in heaven protect my poor girl."
Then more kisses through the carriage windows.
The guards and porters frantically called upon the people to stand back; they clung on, careless of danger to life and limb; and as the black, hideous, relentless monster shot away they rushed along the line; they passed into the fields, and waved handkerchiefs, and shouted the names of the parting child or sister or brother; until at last the distance swallowed up the train and its occupants, and then they returned to homes from which forever afterwards the light had passed away.
Such were the scenes which Mat saw, and when he got to Ballybay station there was that look on his face which to any keen observer would have revealed much in the Irish character and afforded the key to many startling episodes in Irish history. It was a look at once of infinite rage and infinite despair; it spoke of wrong—hated, gigantic, at once intolerable and insurmountable. One sees a similar impress in the faces of Irishmen in Massachusetts, though the climate of America has reduced the large, loose frame to the thin build of the new country, and has bleached the ruddy complexion of Ireland to a sickly white or an ugly yellow; it is the look one can detect in the faces of the men who dream of death in the midst of slain foes and wrecked palaces; it blazes in the eyes of Healy, as with sacrilegious hand he smites the venerable front of the mother of Parliaments.
Mat had come to Ireland for the Easter recess; he had drawn out of the savings bank a few pounds of the money he had placed there for the furnishing of the house which he destined for Mary and Betty Cunningham. He longed to have a share in punishing the perjured traitor who had betrayed the country. The sights he had seen along the route satisfied him as to the temper of the people, and he entered Ballybay secure in the hope that if the traitor had been raised by the town to the opportunity of deceiving the people, he would be cast into the dust by the same hand.
He had not been long in the town when he found that he had wholly misconceived its spirit. The one feeling that seemed to dominate all others, was that the acceptance by Crowe of office meant another election; and another election meant another shower of gold.
In his father's house he found assembled his father and mother, and Tom Flaherty and Mary. They were discussing the election, of course, and this was how they discussed it.
"I always thought Crowe was a smart fellow," said Fleming. "There's one thing certain; he'll have plenty of money now, and as I have always said, 'I'm a Protestant,'" and then Mat repeated his characteristic saying.
"Do you mean to say," said Mat, with a face fierce with rage and surprise, "that you'd vote again for Crowe, after his treason?"
"And why shouldn't he vote for him?" asked Mat's mother, in a voice almost as fierce as his own. "Isn't he a Government man, and doesn't every one know that the people who can do anything for themselves or anybody else in Ireland are Government men?"
Mat, fond as he was of his mother, felt almost as if he could have killed her at that moment; he could not speak for a few minutes for rage. At last he almost shrieked, "If there was any decency in Ballybay Crowe would never leave the town alive."
"Ah! the crachure!" said Tom Flaherty.
"Ah! the crachure! Why shouldn't he look out for himself; shure, isn't that what we're all trying to do? God bless us."
Mary glanced uneasily at Mat, but he refused to look at her; she seemed for a moment spoiled in his eyes by her kinship with this polluted and degraded creature. His father gave him a wistful glance, but said nothing. Whenever there was a tempest between his wife and his son he remained silent.
And so this was how Ballybay regarded the great betrayal! Mat felt inclined to throw himself into the Shannon, and have done with life as quickly as he was losing hope and faith.
He took a look once more at the bare and squalid streets and gloomy people; and then at the frowning castle and the passing regiment of the English garrison; and he despaired of his country.
But he had come to help in the fight against Crowe; and after the involuntary tribute of this brief interval of despondency, he at once set to work. After many disappointments he found a few men who shared his views of the situation, and a committee was formed to go out and ask Captain Ponsonby to stand once more; for though Mat hated the politics of Ponsonby, he thought any stick was good enough to beat the foul traitor with. Captain Ponsonby consented, and so the contest was started. The Nation newspaper sent down several of its staff; the old Tenant Right Party held meetings, asked that Ballybay should do its duty, and save the whole country from the awful calamity of triumphant treason. Everything was thus arranged for a struggle with Crowe that would test all his powers, backed though he was by the money and the influence of the Government.
Mat's speeches, the articles in the newspapers, and the vigorous efforts of the few honest men in the town, had at last roused Ballybay until it began to share some of the profound horror and indignation which the action of Crowe had provoked throughout the country generally. There was but one more thing necessary, and the defeat of Crowe was certain; if the bishop joined in the opposition, there was no possibility of his winning.
All Ireland waited in painful tension to see what the verdict of the bishop would be. Mat heard it before anybody else, for a young curate who lived in the College House with the bishop, and was a fierce Nationalist, gave Mat a daily bulletin; the bishop resolved to support the Solicitor-General.
At first nobody would believe the tale; but the next day it was put beyond all doubt, and Mat was almost suffocated by his own wrath as he saw the "Seraph," with his divine face, arm in arm with the perjured ruffian that had brought sorrow to so many thousands of homes.
Mat fought on, but it was no longer with any strong hope of winning. His face grew darker every day, and the lines became drawn about his eyes, for there was another struggle going on in his mind at this moment, as well as the political contest in which he was engaged.
The reader may remember the monitor of the school in which Mat was a pupil when the eviction of the widow Cunningham took place. The monitor was now the teacher of the National School, and Mat and he had begun to have many colloquies.
Michael Reed was regarded as a very sardonic and disagreeable person by most of the people of Ballybay. His hatchet face seemed appropriate to a man who never seemed to agree with the opinion of anybody else, who sneered, it was thought, all round, who laughed when other people wept, and who derided the moments of exultant hope. He had always been among those who hated and distrusted Crowe, and Mat, who was intolerant himself, rather avoided him, while he still had faith in the traitor. But the wreck of all his illusions sent him repentant to Reed, and they had many conversations, in which Mat found himself listening willingly and after a while even greedily, to ideas that a short time before he would have been himself the first to denounce as folly and madness.
The idea of Reed was that the only way to work out the freedom of Ireland was by force of arms. Mat at first was inclined to laugh at the idea; but an impressionable and vehement nature such as his was ill calculated to cope for a lengthened time with a nature precise, cold, and stubborn like that of Reed. Strength of will and tenacity of opinion make their way against better judgment, especially if there can be no doubt of the sincerity of the man of such a temper, and the rigid eye, the proud air, and the whole attitude of Reed spoke, and spoke truly, of a life of absolute purity, and of a fanaticism of Spartan endurance.
There was one consequence of the acceptance of the ideas of Reed, and from this, with all his devotion and rage and sorrow for the pitiable condition of his country, Mat still shrank. A revolutionary could not marry or be engaged to marry; for what man had the right to tie to his dark and uncertain fate the life of a woman—perhaps of children?
The defeat of Crowe would once more restore faith to the people in constitutional resources, and would save them from the cynicism and apathy which might require a revolutionary movement to rouse them once more to hope and action. And thus in fighting against Crowe, Mat now felt as if he were fighting not merely for his country, but for his own dear life.
Then if Crowe were defeated, Mat could return to his work in London, and resume his efforts in carrying out the sacred purpose of raising his father and mother from poverty; for of marriage he could not think unless he were in a position to help his father and mother more than he had done hitherto. If he ever dared to think of marriage otherwise, there came before him the gaunt image of his mother pointing to her faded and ragged workbox with its awful pawn-tickets and bank bills.
It was while he was in the midst of this fierce and agonizing struggle that Mat was called hurriedly one day to the house of Mary, by the news that Mrs. Flaherty had been taken very ill, and was supposed to be dying.
Mat came to the house, endeared to him by so many memories and hopes, trembling, and with a cold feeling about his heart. Why was it that he started back with a pang when he saw Cosgrave in the house before him? Why at that moment did there rush again over his whole soul that awful image which swept over him before? Why in imagination did he stand at night on a wild heath, shivering and alone?
"What brought Cosgrave here?" he asked of Mary sharply.
"Oh!" said Mary, "he came to tell us that he had been made a J. P."
"So he has attained his pitiful ambition," said Mat sharply. "It's through sneaks like him that scoundrels like Crowe are able to betray the country."
"Oh, never mind the low creature," said Mary, with a look of infinite contempt, that Mat was surprised to find very soothing.
He went up stairs. A look at the face of Mrs. Flaherty showed him at once that the alarm was not a false one—she was evidently dying.
There was the old look of patient affection in her tender face, and there was another look, too, which Mat could not misunderstand. It was a look of wistful appeal, half-uttered question, of a fond but tremulous hope.
And it added to the misery of that dark hour that Mat could say nothing, and that he had to let that true and deeply-loved soul pass out of life with its greatest fear unsatisfied, and its brightest hope unassured. For Mat could not utter a decisive word.
Between him and the speech there stood two shadows, potent, dark, and resistless—his mother pointing to her workbox, and Reed pointing to a revolver.
Mary stood beside the bed tearless.
"Doesn't Mary bear up well?" said Mat in surprise to her blubbering father.
"Mary doesn't cry," said her father; "she frets," and in these words Mat thought the whole character of the girl was summed up.
Mrs. Flaherty died on Thursday; the polling was on the following day. Mat was still under the impression of the dark and painful scene when the new excitement came. He hoped against hope to the last, went about the town like one insane, and spoke in his passion of country even to O'Flynn, the pawn-broker, and of honor to Mat Fleming, and then waited at the closing hour to hear the result. The result was:—
| Crowe | 125 |
| Ponsonby | 112 |
Mat turned pale, and almost fell, his head swam, his heart seemed for a moment to have stopped. He would not yet acknowledge it in so many words; but the sentence still kept ringing in his ears, "Thy doom is sealed, thy doom is sealed."