‘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.