‘Of course he is. They are already hull down; besides, who’s to assist his escape, Tom? You forget the position he stands in.’
‘But I do not forget it,’ answered I; ‘and you need not be afraid that I will seek to compromise you, gentlemen. Tell me where to find the nearest justice of the peace, and I will go and surrender myself.’
‘It is your wisest and best policy,’ said the elder. ‘I am not in the commission, but a neighbour of mine is, and lives a few miles off, and, if you like, we ‘ll accompany you to his house.’
I accepted the offer, and soon found myself descending the steep path of the mountain in perfect good-fellowship with the two strangers. It is likely enough, if they had taken any peculiar pains to obliterate the memory of our first meeting, or if they had displayed any extraordinary efforts of conciliation, that I should have been on my guard against them; but their manners, on the contrary, were easy and unaffected in every respect. They spoke of the expedition sensibly and dispassionately, and while acknowledging that there were many things they would like to see altered in the English rule of Ireland, they were very averse from the desire of a foreign intervention to rectify them.
I avowed to them that we had been grossly deceived. That all the representations made to us depicted Ireland as a nation of soldiers, wanting only arms and military stores to rise as a vast army. That the peasantry were animated by one spirit, and the majority of the gentry willing to hazard everything on the issue of a struggle. Our Killala experiences, of which I detailed some, heartily amused them, and it was in a merry interchange of opinions that we now walked along together.
A cluster of houses, too small to be called a village, and known as the ‘Cranagh,’ stood in a little nook of the bay; and here they lived. They were brothers; and the elder held some small appointment in the revenue, which maintained them as bachelors in this cheap country. In a low conversation that passed between them it was agreed that they would detain me as their guest for that evening, and on the morrow accompany me to the magistrate’s house, about five miles distant. I was not sorry to accept their hospitable offer. I longed for a few hours of rest and respite before embarking on another sea of troubles. The failure of the expedition, and the departure of the fleet, had overwhelmed me with grief, and I was in no mood to confront new perils.
If my new acquaintances could have read my inmost thoughts, their manner towards me could not have displayed more kindness or good-breeding. Not pressing me with questions on subjects where the greatest curiosity would have been permissible, they suffered me to tell only so much as I wished of our late plans; and, as if purposely to withdraw my thoughts from the unhappy theme of our defeat, led me to talk of France, and her career in Europe.
It was not without surprise that I saw how conversant the newspapers had made them with European politics, nor how widely different did events appear when viewed from afar off, and by the lights of another and different nationality. Thus all that we were doing on the Continent to propagate liberal notions, and promote the spread of freedom, seemed to their eyes but the efforts of an ambitious power to crush abroad what they had annihilated at home, and extend their own influence in disseminating doctrines, all to revert, one day or other, to some grand despotism, whenever the man arose capable to exercise it. The elder would not even concede to us that we were fit for freedom.
‘You are glorious fellows at destroying an old edifice,’ said he, ‘but sorry architects when comes the question of rebuilding; and as to liberty, your highest notion of it is an occasional anarchy like schoolboys, you will bear any tyranny for ten years, to have ten days of a “barring out” afterward.’
I was not much flattered by these opinions; and, what was worse, I could not get them out of my head all night afterwards. Many things I had never doubted about now kept puzzling and confounding me, and I began, for the first time, to know the misery of the struggle between implicit obedience and conviction.