“'Filius peccatoris exardebit in crimine patris,'——the son of the sinful man shall burn out in his father's shame! “—said D'Esmonde, reading aloud from the volume in his hand.
Hipsley almost started at the solemnity with which these awful words were uttered, and stood for a few seconds gazing on the pale and thoughtful face which was still bent over the book.
“My mission has then failed!” said the lawyer, regretfully. “I am sorry it should be so.”
A cold bow was the only reply Cahill returned to this speech, and the other slowly withdrew, and took his way back to Kilkenny, the solemn and terrible denunciation still ringing in his ears as he went.
CHAPTER XXXIX. THE COURT-HOUSE OF KILKENNY.
The character of crime in Ireland has preserved for some years back a most terrible consistency. The story of every murder is the same. The same secret vengeance; the same imputed wrong; the same dreadful sentence issued from a dark and bloody tribunal; the victim alone is changed, but all the rest is unaltered; and we read, over and over again, of the last agonies on the high-road and in the noonday, till, sated and wearied, we grow into a terrible indifference as to guilt, and talk of the “wild justice of the people” as though amongst the natural causes which shorten human life. If this be so, and to its truth we call to witness those who in every neighborhood have seen some fearful event—happening, as it were, at their very doors—deplored today, almost forgotten to-morrow; and while such is the case, the public mind is painfully sensitive as to the details of any guilt attended with new and unaccustomed agencies. In fact, with all the terrible catalogue before us,' we should be far from inferring a great degree of guiltiness to a people in whom we see infinitely more of misguided energies and depraved passions than of that nature whose sordid incentives to crime constitute the bad of other countries. We are not, in this, the apologist for murder. God forbid that we should ever be supposed to palliate, by even a word, those brutal assassinations which make every man blush to call himself an Irishman! We would only be understood as saying that these crimes, dark, fearful, and frequent as they are, do not argue the same hopeless debasement of our population as the less organized guilt of other countries; and inasmuch as the vengeance even of the savage is a nobler instinct than the highwayman's passion for gain, so we cherish a hope that the time is not distant when the peasant shall tear out of his heart the damnable delusion of vindication by blood, when he will learn a manly fortitude under calamity, a generous trust in those above him, and, better again, a freeman's consciousness that the law will vindicate him against injury, and that we live in an age when the great are powerless to do wrong, unless when their inhumanity be screened behind the darker shadow of the murder that avenges it! Then, indeed, we have no sympathy for all the sufferings of want, or all the miseries of fever; then, we forget the dreary hovel, the famished children, the palsy of age, and the hopeless cry of starving infancy,—we have neither eyes nor ears but for the sights and sounds of murder!
We have said that amidst all the frequency of crime there is no country of Europe where any case of guilt accompanied by new agencies or attended by any unusual circumstances is sure to excite so great and widespread interest. The very fact of an accusation involving any one in rank above the starving cottier is looked upon as almost incredible, and far from feeling sensibility dulled by the ordinary recurrence of bloodshed, the crime becomes associated in our minds with but one class, and as originating in one theme.
We have gradually been led away by these thoughts from the remark which first suggested them, and now we turn again to the fact, that the city of Kilkenny became a scene of the most intense anxiety as the morning of that eventful trial dawned. Visitors poured in from the neighboring counties, and even from Dublin. The case had been widely commented on by the press; and although with every reserve as regarded the accused, a most painful impression against old Mr. Dalton had spread on all sides. Most of his own contemporaries had died; of the few who remained, they were very old men, fast sinking into imbecility, and only vaguely recollecting “Wild Peter” as one who would have stopped at nothing. The new generation, then, received the impressions of the man thus unjustly; nor were their opinions more lenient that they lived in an age which no longer tolerated the excesses of the one that preceded it. Gossip, too, had circulated its innumerable incidents on all the personages of this strange drama; and from the venerable Count Stephen down to the informer Meekins, every character was now before the world.
That the Daltons had come hundreds of miles, and had offered immense sums of money to suppress the exposure, was among the commonest rumors of the time, and that the failure of this attempt was now the cause of the young man's illness and probable death. Meekins's character received many commentaries and explanations. Some alleged that he was animated by an old grudge against the family, never to be forgiven. Others said that it was to some incident of the war abroad that he owed his hatred to young Dalton; and, lastly, it was rumored that, having some connection with the conspiracy, he was anxious to wipe his conscience of the guilt before he took on him the orders of some lay society, whose vows he professed. All these mysterious and shadowy circumstances tended to heighten the interest of the coming event, and the city was crowded in every part by strangers, who not only filled the Court-house, but thronged the street in front, and even occupied the windows and roofs of the opposite houses.