“I’ll not have you talking or walking with Denis Ryan,” she said; “nor your father won’t have it! Everybody knows what he is, and what his friends are. There’s nothing too bad for those fellows to do, and no daughter of mine will mix herself up with them!”
“Denis isn’t doing anything wrong, mother,” said Mary. “And if he thinks Ireland ought to be a free republic, hasn’t he as good a right to his own opinion as you or me, or my father either?”
“No man has a right to be shooting and murdering innocent people, whether they’re policemen or whatever they are. And that’s what Denis Ryan and the rest of them are at, day and night, all over the country. And if they’re not doing it here yet, they soon will. Blackguards, I call them, and the sooner they’re hanged the better, every one of them!”
In Flaherty’s barn that night the gentleman from Dublin spoke to an audience of some twenty or thirty young men. He spoke with passion and conviction. He told again the thousand times repeated story of the wrongs which Ireland has suffered at the hands of the English in old, old days. He told of more recent happenings, of men arrested and imprisoned without trial, without even definite accusation, of intolerable infringements of the common rights. He spoke of the glorious hope of national liberty, of Ireland as a free Republic. The men he spoke too, young men all of them, listened with flashing eyes, with clenched teeth, and faces moist with emotion. They responded to his words with sudden growings and curses. The speaker went on to tell of the deeds of men elsewhere in Ireland. “The soldiers of the Irish Republic,” so he called them. They had attacked the armed forces of English rule. They had stormed police barracks. They had taken arms and ammunitions where such things were to be found. These, he said, were glorious deeds wrought by men everywhere in Ireland.
“But what have you done here?” he asked. “And what do you mean to do?”
Michael Murnihan spoke next. He said that he was ashamed of the men around him and of the club to which he belonged.
“It’s a reproach to us,” he said, “that we’re the only men in Ireland that have done nothing. Are we ready to fight when the day for fighting comes? We are not. For what arms have we among us? Only two revolvers. Two revolvers, and that’s all. Not a gun, though you know well, and I know, that there’s plenty of guns round about us in the hands of men that are enemies to Ireland. I could name twenty houses in the locality where there are guns, and good guns, and you could name as many more. Why don’t we go and take them? Are we cowards?”
The men around him shouted angrily that they were no cowards. Denis Ryan, excited and intensely moved, shouted with the rest. It seemed to him that an intolerable reproach lay on him and all of them.
“What’s to hinder us going out to-night?” said Murnihan. “Why shouldn’t we take the guns that ought to be in our hands and not in the hands of men who’d use them against us? All of you that are in favour of going out tonight will hold up your hands.”
There was a moment’s silence. None of the men present had ever taken part in any deed of violence, had ever threatened human life or openly and flagrantly broken the law. The delegate from Dublin, standing near Murnihan, looked round at the faces of the men. There was a cool, contemptuous smile on his lips.