He shook himself free from the dismal prospect of his thoughts, for since Madam Gillin bustled out my lady had been very quiet. He peeped through the doorway. No! She had not moved since he looked in an hour ago; but was sitting still with her chin on her two hands--gazing with knitted brows at the body as it lay, its form defined dimly through the sheet that covered it.
Terence, lulled by tears, had fallen asleep long since upon the floor. Shane walked hither and thither, biting his nails furtively; for he was a brave boy who feared not his father dead, though he trembled in his presence whilst alive. Had he dared he would have gone forth into the street to see the gay folks, the lights, and junketing, for he was high up in his teens and longed to be a man. But it would not do to leave the mother whom he loved and dreaded to the protection of Curran--the low lawyer. He was my lord now, and the head of his house, and must protect her who had hitherto protected him. He marvelled, though, in his slow brain, as it wandered round the knotty subject, over the passage of arms betwixt the ladies; their covert menace; the oath the little lad was made to swear. It was all strange--his mother of all the strangest. Protect her, forsooth! The uncompromising mouth and square chin of her ladyship--the steely glitter of her light grey eye--showed independent will enough for two. Clearly she was intended to protect others, rather than herself to need protection. But her manner was odd, her frown of evil augury. At a moment of soul-stirring woe, such calmness as this of hers could bode no good.
All through the night she sat reviewing her life, while Shane walked in a fidget, and patient Curran waited. She brooded over the past, examined the threatening future, without moving once or uttering a sound. She was deciding in her mind on a future plan of action which should lead her safely through a sea of dangers. Was she as relentless as she looked? Was this an innately wicked nature, set free at last from duress, revolving how best to abuse its liberty; or was it one at bottom good, but prejudiced and narrow, chained down and warped awry, and dulled by circumstance?
CHAPTER IV.
[BANISHMENT.]
Years went by. The volcano burned blithely, and the upper orders danced on it. No court was more like that of a stage potentate than the court of the Irish Viceroy. No ridottos were so gorgeous as those of Dublin; no equipages so sumptuous; no nobles so magnificently reckless. Mr. Handel averred in broken German that he adored the Hibernian capital, and gave birth to his sublime creations for the edification of Dublin belles. The absentees returned home in troops, finding that in their mother's mansion were many fatted calves; and vied with one another, in the matter of Italian stuccoists and Parisian painters, for the display of a genteel taste. But, as the poet hath it, 'things are not always as they seem.' The crust of the volcano grew daily thinner. What a gnashing of teeth would result from its collapse!
The Grand Convention fell a victim to its leaders, and from a mighty engine of the national will shrivelled into an antic posturing. Mr. Grattan (the man of eighty-two par excellence) perceived that he was overreached; that perfidious Albion shuffled one by one out of her engagements, that the independence, over which he had crowed like a revolutionary cock, was no more than an illusory phantom. The Renunciation Act was repealable at pleasure, he found, and no renunciation save in name. The horrid Poyning, the objectionable 6th of George III., tossed into limbo with such pomp, might become law again by a mere pen-scratch. Ireland was decked in the frippery of freedom, which, torn off piecemeal, would leave her naked and ashamed. The Volunteers, perceiving that their blaring and strutting had produced nothing real, looked sheepishly at one another and returned to their plain clothes. After all, they were asses in lions' skins; their association a theatrical pageant of national chivalry, which dazzled Europe for an instant till men smelt the sawdust and the orange-peel and recognised in the helmet a dishcover. During all this vapouring and trumpeting, England had held her own, by means of the subservient Lords and the heavily mortgaged Commons. The parliament, too base for shame, smiled unabashed; the Volunteers, conscience-smitten and in despair, broke up and fell to pieces. The Catholics were as much serfs as ever. Derry, whose conscience was troubled with compunctious visitings, went so far as to propose that the Catholics (burning source of trouble in all altercations) should emigrate en masse to Rome as a bodyguard for his Holiness; but the latter, dreading an incursion of three million savages, which would have been like an invasion of the Huns, declined with thanks the present, and the laudable scheme was given up.
Far-sighted folks became aware that the pretty tricks of the puppets were due to an English punchinello. The fantoccini did credit to their machinist, who was skilful at pulling of wires. Who was he? Why, Mr. Pitt the younger, who would have his dolls jump as he listed, though they should come to be shattered in the jumping. Mr. Pitt, the British premier, set his wits to work to keep all grades and classes squabbling. At one time, to exasperate the Papists, he gave an extra twist to the penal screw; at another, he untwisted it suddenly to anger the Orangemen. Coercion and relief were two reins in his skilled hands wherewith he sawed the mouth of poor rawboned Rosinante, till the harried animal came down upon its haunches. He established a forty-shilling franchise which gave votes to the poorest, most ignorant, and most dependent peasantry in Europe. This he declared was the divine gift of liberty. Nothing of the sort. It merely placed a fresh tool in the hands of large proprietors who were dying to be bribed and charmed to have something new to sell.
Though the Volunteers ceased to be a cause of uneasiness, it was plain to Mr. Pitt that a repetition of their military fandango must be made impossible. How was this to be accomplished? As it was, they had left behind them, when they vanished, the nucleus of a disease--a small but sturdy band of patriots, who were not to be bought or cajoled. Unless treated in time, this spot might inflame and grow contagious. How was it to be treated? That was the grave question whereon hung the peace of Erin. The honest handful saw the rock on which the Convention had split, and were humble enough to try and remedy the error. Theobald--romantic young protégé of Arthur Wolfe--was the first to show them the true case, to demonstrate that Ireland's harmony was England's disappointment; that the only hope for motherland lay, not in a commingling of a few red uniforms, or a picturesque mixing of social grades, but in a compact welding together for the common weal of the different religious creeds which had distracted the land with its dissensions since the Reformation. 'Till this is done,' he said, 'the Sassanagh will toss us as a battledore a shuttlecock. Establish the grand principle of liberty of conscience, bridge the abyss of mutual intolerance, stay the carnage of the first emotions of the heart! If the rights of men be duties to God, then are we of the same religion. Our creed of civil faith is the same. Let us agree then to exclude from our thoughts all things in which we differ, and be brethren in heart and mind for our mother's sake.' The words of the romantic young apostle touched his hearers on their tenderest chord, and they swore to learn wisdom by the past, and live in amity for ever. The quick revulsion from bigotry to tolerance was not so amazing as it seems, for Theobald Wolfe Tone was but the visible expression of the spirit of his age--the abuse-abhorring spirit which distinguished the eighteenth century, and culminated in the French upheaving of '89.
That sanguinary outburst, which blew into the elements a long-rooted despotism, and which clenched the new-fangled faith enunciated in the War of Independence, had an enormous effect on Ireland--an effect of which Mr. Pitt availed himself for his own purposes with his usual tact. The principle of '89 made its way to England, where the genius of the Constitution prevailed against its allurements; then passed across the Channel, where it was eagerly received by men who were being hounded on to recklessness. The adverse religious sects which had just vowed eternal amity, seeing what passed in Paris, looked on one another with alarm. The Catholic clergy grew suspicious of the reformers who extolled the conduct of France, because the new régime had produced Free Thought, or rather had endowed the bantling with strength which the great Voltaire had nourished. People were startled by bold views which were new to them. The timid looked down a chasm to which they could perceive no bottom, and shrank back. A fanatical few were for going all lengths at once, and demanding the help of France to produce an Irish upheaval. At this juncture a friendly English policy--a judicious combination of discipline and conciliation--would have allayed the brewing storm. But it was not the intention of British ministers that the country should be tranquillised just yet. Quite the contrary. They resolved to stir up such a tempest as should frighten Erin out of her poor wits, and drive her to distrust her own strength and her own wisdom for the rest of her natural existence.