The Landleaguers

by Anthony Trollope

"But they can shoot—" Then Mrs. Blake left the rest of her sentence unspoken, having been checked by her husband's eye. The boy, however, had heard it and trembled.

"Come along, Florian," said the father. "Get up along with Peter." The attempt which he had made to live with his son on affectionate paternal relations had hardly been successful. The boy had been told so much of murderers that he had been made to fear. Peter,—and other Peters about the country,—had filled his mind with sad foreboding. And there had always been something timid, something almost unmanly in his nature. He had seemed to prefer to shrink and cower and be mysterious with the Carrolls to coming forward boldly with such a man as Yorke Clayton. The girls had seen this, and had declared that he was no more than a boy; but his father had seen it and had made no such allowance. And now he saw that he trembled. But Florian got up on the car, and Peter drove them off to Ballyglunin.

Carnlough was not above three Irish miles from Ballyglunin; and Mr. Jones started on the little journey without a misgiving. He sat alone on the near side of the car, and Florian sat on the other, together with Peter who was driving. The horse was a heavy, slow-going animal, rough and hairy in its coat, but trustworthy and an old servant. There had been a time when Mr. Jones kept a carriage, but that had been before the bad times had begun. The carriage horses had been sold after the flood,—as Ada had called the memorable incident; and now there were but three cart horses at Morony Castle, of which this one animal alone was habitually driven in the car. The floods, indeed, had now retreated from the lands of Ballintubber and the flood gates were mended; but there would be no crop of hay on all those eighty acres this year, and Mr. Jones was in no condition to replace his private stud. As he went along on this present journey he was thinking bitterly of the injury which had been done him. He had lost over two hundred tons of hay, and each ton of hay would have been worth three pounds ten shillings. He had been unable to get a sluice gate mended till men had been brought together from Monaghan and parts of Cavan to mend them for him, and he had even to send these men into Limerick to buy the material, as not a piece of timber could be procured in Galway for the use of a household so well boycotted as was Morony Castle. There had been also various calls on Mr. Jones from those relatives whose money had been left as mortgages on his property. And no rent had as yet come in, although various tenants had been necessarily evicted. Every man's hand was against him; so that there was no money in his coffers. He who had chiefly sinned against him,—who was the first to sin,—was the sinner whom he was about to prosecute at Galway. It must be supposed, therefore, that he was not in a good humour as he was driven along the road to Ballyglunin.

They had not yet passed the boundary fence between Carnlough and the property of one of the numerous race of Bodkins, when Mr. Jones saw a mask, which he supposed to be a mask worn by a man, through a hole in the wall just in front of him, but high above his head. And at the same moment he could see the muzzles of a double-barrelled rifle presented through the hole in the wall. What he saw he saw but for a few seconds; but he could see it plainly. He saw it so plainly as to be able afterwards to swear to a black mask, and to a double-barrelled gun. Then a trigger was pulled, and one bullet—the second—went through the collar of his own coat, while the first had had a more fatal and truer aim. The father jumped up and turning round saw that his boy had fallen to the ground. "Oh, my God!" said Peter, and he stopped the horse suddenly. The place was one where the commencement had been made of a cutting in the road during the potato failure of 1846; so that the wall and the rifle which had been passed through it were about four or five feet above the car. Mr. Jones rushed up the elevation, and clambered, he did not know how, into the field. There he saw the back of a man speeding along from the wall, and in the man's hand there was a gun. Mr. Jones looked around but there was no one nigh him but Peter, the old servant, and his dying boy. He could see, however, that the man who ran was short of stature.

But though his rage had sufficed to carry him up from the road into the field, the idea that his son had been shot caused him to pause as he ran, and to return to the road. When he got there he found two girls about seventeen and eighteen years of age, one sitting on the road with Florian's head on her lap, and the other kneeling and holding the boy's hands. "Oh, yer honour! sorrow a taste in life do we know about it," said the kneeling girl.

"Not a sight did we see, or a sound did we hear," said the other, "only the going off of the blunderbuss. Oh, wirra shure! oh, musha, musha! and it's dead he is, the darling boy." Mr. Jones came round and picked up poor Florian and laid him on the car. The bullet had gone true to its mark and had buried itself in his brain. There was the end of poor Florian Jones and all his troubles. The father did not say a word, not even in reply to Peter's wailings or to the girls' easy sorrow; but, taking the rein in his own hands, drove the car with the body on it back to Carnlough.

We can hardly analyse the father's mind as he went. Not a tear came to his relief. Nor during this half hour can he hardly have been said to sorrow. An intensity of wrath filled his breast. He had spent his time for many a long year in doing all in his power for those around him, and now they had brought him to this. They had robbed him of his boy's heart. They had taught his boy to be one of them, and to be untrue to his own people. And now, because he had yielded to better teachings, they had murdered him. They had taught his boy to be a coward; for even in his bereavement he remembered poor Florian's failing. The accursed Papist people were all cowards down to their backbones. So he said of them in his rage. There was not one of them who could look any peril in the face as did Yorke Clayton or his son Frank. But they were terribly powerful in their wretched want of manliness. They could murder, and were protected in their bloodthirstiness one by another. He did not doubt but that those two girls who were wailing on the road knew well enough who was the murderer, but no one would tell in this accursed, unhallowed, godless country. The honour and honesty of one man did not, in these days, prompt another to abstain from vice. The only heroism left in the country was the heroism of mystery, of secret bloodshed and of hidden attacks.

He had driven back methodically to Carnlough gates, but he hesitated to carry his burden up to the hall-door. Would it not be better for him at once to go home, and there to endure the suffering that was in store for him? But he remembered that it would behove him to take what steps might be possible for tracing the murderer. That by no steps could anything be done, he was sure; but still the attempt was necessary. He had, however, paused a minute or two at the open gate when he was rebuked by Peter. "Shure yer honour is going up to the house to get the constables to scour the counthry."

"Scour the country!" said the father. "All the country will turn out to defend the murderer of my boy." But he drove up to the front, and Peter knocked at the door.

"Good heaven, Jones!" said Mr. Blake, as he looked at the car and its occupant. The poor boy's head was supported on the pillow behind the driver's seat, on which no one sat. Peter held him by both his feet, and Mr. Jones had his hand within his grasp.