Her sympathies were with Amos Scott, but her common sense told her a man ought to be able to insist on having his own without paying for his temerity by his life.
Once again she was at sea, as every person is sooner or later who embarks on the study of Irish difficulties. “There was something rotten in the state of Denmark” she had long known. Dimly she was beginning to comprehend part of the rottenness lay in public feeling, popular prejudice, in that crass ignorance born of Romish supremacy, and nursed by self-asserting Dissent, till it might have puzzled a wiser than Solomon to say whether Catholic or Protestant were the most intractable—whether the senseless obedience of the south to its priests were worse than the bigoted intolerance of the north to every created being which differed in opinion from itself.
Every great virtue throws a shadow—the loftier the virtue the longer the shadow. Grace understood, who better?—the virtues of her hardworking, uncomplaining, patient, stubborn northern compatriots; but the dark shadows she had seen likewise; she was beginning to understand that the natives of no land are perfect, that God has conferred no more special patent of immunity from the taint of original sin on the poor than on the rich.
Though an enthusiastic, Grace was a thoughtful woman—a conjunction in one so quietly brought up, not merely possible, but probable, and the problem of humanity, which sooner or later troubles every one brought into contact with it, began to perplex her the first hour she again set foot in Ireland.
The same trouble which beset her is vexing English philanthropists at the present day. Even in happy England there is a cancer; who shall adventure to cut it out? there is a worm at the root; who shall dare turn up the ground, and show where it is? There are doctors who would palliate—there are men who would destroy the upper branches—who would prune and cut and lop and top the trees; but there are none, unless, indeed, it may be a few brave souls, who have wisdom enough and courage sufficient to turn round and tell the lower classes,—“The disease is in yourselves. We cannot cure it unless you will consent to help yourselves. You may lop and top for ever—you may cut down an ancient aristocracy, and try to dignify a mushroom nobility of your own creation, but your labour will be for nought, and your trouble loss utterly without gain, for wherever the evil may have begun it is with you it now lies. The rank and file of the social army are utterly demoralised. Each man wants to command. No man is willing to obey. The spirit of discontent is abroad. Work has become distasteful; in that state of life in which God has placed him no human being seems satisfied to stay.”
In one respect the fault of the Irish has always been that of resting satisfied too easily, and this idea was an integral part of Grace’s faith. At the same time she, being at once clear-sighted and critical, could not avoid seeing her country people were satisfied easily, or indeed at all, only when the satisfaction was given in the way that pleased them; that is to say, a dinner of fish, under certain conditions, was not objectionable, but a dinner, even off a stalled ox, unless it happened to be served exactly as they thought well, or in the place they saw fit to eat it, would not have met with their approval.
Had she not herself offered to Amos Scott the choice of farms as fertile, homesteads as substantial as that he could hope to hold no longer; and had he not refused her kindness almost with scorn. He said he would have the familiar acres or none. He would have the home rendered dear by the mere passage of time, by the events which had taken place within its walls, or else a dry ditch and the stars of heaven shining down on him and his. He would law and law and law until his last shilling was gone, in feeing men who could never put his wrong right on this earth; he would fight every inch of the ground only to be beaten at last; he said all this—what had come of it?
That he was lying in gaol, waiting his trial for murder; that, likely as not, he would walk out some morning on the scaffold—his grey hair floating in the wind—to end years of suffering, to expiate years of folly with his life.
Her sympathies were with him. How would it fare with the wrong-doers, if no one had compassion for those who err? If she could help him, if she could save him, she would. To Mrs. Hartley she had said, and said as she believed truly, she must return to Ireland chiefly for Nettie’s sake. Now she was in Ireland, Grace could not conceal from herself the fact that she had come home as much in the interests of the accused as in those of Mr. Brady’s widow.
“Poor Amos,” she thought, “the gentry will be all against him. They will forget what he suffered. They will remember only his sin.”