“To a poor man who has lodged for these few days past next door to us,” replied the child; “I don’t know his name rightly, but he is an Irishman, and he goes out a-haymaking in the daytime along with a number of others. He knew Mr. O’Neill in his own country, and he told mammy a great deal about his goodness.”
As the child finished these words, Phœbe took out of a drawer some clothes, which she had made for the poor woman’s children, and gave them to the little girl. It happened that the Limerick gloves had been thrown into this drawer; and Phœbe’s favourable sentiments of the giver of those gloves were revived by what she had just heard, and by the confession Mrs. Hill had made, that she had no reasons, and but vague suspicious, for thinking ill of him. She laid the gloves perfectly smooth, and strewed over them, whilst the little girl went on talking of Mr. O’Neill, the leaves of a rose which she had worn on Sunday.
Mr. Hill was all this time in deep conference with those prudent men of Hereford who were of his own opinion, about the perilous hole under the cathedral. The ominous circumstance of this ball was also considered, the great expense at which the Irish glover lived, and his giving away gloves, which was a sure sign he was not under any necessity to sell them, and consequently a proof that, though he pretended to be a glover, he was something wrong in disguise. Upon putting all these things together, it was resolved by these over-wise politicians that the best thing that could be done for Hereford, and the only possible means of preventing the immediate destruction of its cathedral, would be to take Mr. O’Neill into custody. Upon recollection, however, it was perceived that there was no legal ground on which he could be attacked. At length, after consulting an attorney, they devised what they thought an admirable mode of proceeding.
Our Irish hero had not that punctuality which English tradesmen usually observe in the payment of bills; he had, the preceding year, run up a long bill with a grocer in Hereford, and, as he had not at Christmas cash in hand to pay it, he had given a note, payable six months after date. The grocer, at Mr. Hill’s request, made over the note to him, and it was determined that the money should be demanded, as it was now due, and that, if it was not paid directly, O’Neill should be that night arrested. How Mr. Hill made the discovery of this debt to the grocer agree with his former notion that the Irish glover had always money at command we cannot well conceive, but anger and prejudice will swallow down the grossest contradictions without difficulty.
When Mr. Hill’s clerk went to demand payment of the note, O’Neill’s head was full of the ball which he was to give that evening. He was much surprised at the unexpected appearance of the note: he had not ready money by him to pay it; and after swearing a good deal at the clerk, and complaining of this ungenerous and ungentleman-like behaviour in the grocer and the tanner, he told the clerk to be gone, and not to be bothering him at such an unseasonable time: that he could not have the money then, and did not deserve to have it at all.
This language and conduct were rather new to the English clerk’s mercantile ears: we cannot wonder that it should seem to him, as he said to his master, more the language of a madman than a man of business. This want of punctuality in money transactions, and this mode of treating contracts as matters of favour and affection, might not have damned the fame of our hero in his own country, where such conduct is, alas! too common; but he was now in a kingdom where the manners and customs are so directly opposite, that he could meet with no allowance for his national faults. It would be well for his countrymen if they were made, even by a few mortifications, somewhat sensible of this important difference in the habits of Irish and English traders before they come to settle in England.
But to proceed with our story. On the night of Mr. O’Neill’s grand ball, as he was seeing his fair partner, the perfumer’s daughter, safe home, he felt himself tapped on the shoulder by no friendly hand. When he was told that he was the king’s prisoner, he vociferated with sundry strange oaths, which we forbear to repeat. “No, I am not the king’s prisoner! I am the prisoner of that shabby, rascally tanner, Jonathan Hill. None but he would arrest a gentleman in this way, for a trifle not worth mentioning.”
Miss Jenny Brown screamed when she found herself under the protection of a man who was arrested; and, what between her screams and his oaths, there was such a disturbance that a mob gathered.
Among this mob there was a party of Irish haymakers, who, after returning late from a hard day’s work, had been drinking in a neighbouring ale-house. With one accord they took part with their countryman, and would have rescued him from the civil officers with all the pleasure in life if he had not fortunately possessed just sufficient sense and command of himself to restrain their party spirit, and to forbid them, as they valued his life and reputation, to interfere, by word or deed, in his defence.
He then despatched one of the haymakers home to his mother, to inform her of what had happened, and to request that she would get somebody to be bail for him as soon as possible, as the officers said they could not let him out of their sight till he was bailed by substantial people, or till the debt was discharged.