“A man who won’t die for a principle sins against the light.”
“Uncle,” said Betty O’Brien, “be hanged to your principles for a minute. This is Susan’s brother.”
Mr. Mahony rose, and grasped Bertram’s hand.
“Susan’s brother! Then a friend of Ireland.”
“Half an Irishman, and a good friend,” said Bertram.
Yet before the evening was at an end, his friendship for Ireland was put to a heavy strain again. Mr. Mahony, with his white hair, and blue benevolent eyes, and the three young Irishmen to whom he addressed most of his monologues, made no disguise of their implacable hatred of England. It was not that they denounced England with any violence of language, but rather the deadly coldness, and the kind of loathing, with which they spoke the very name of England.
Worse than that was their contempt. It was plain that they had the fixed belief that the British Government in Ireland was “on the run.” The Irish Republican army was succeeding with its policy of secret warfare. In one week they had killed five British officers and twenty men. They had raided the barracks, seized great quantities of arms, and organised a number of successful ambushes. There were large districts in Ireland into which the Black and Tans dared not penetrate. The British troops were getting nerve-rattled and demoralised. It was obvious by the Government answers to questions in the House of Commons that that was very much the psychological state of “His Majesty’s Ministers.”
The three young Irishmen, smoking French cigarettes interminably, had all been officers of the I. R. A., and had escaped to France when things had become too “hot” for them. One of them, named O’Malley, a handsome, dark-eyed fellow rather like Dennis O’Brien, but with brighter, more humorous eyes, described his adventures as an escaped prisoner from Mountjoy, where he had been under sentence of death after capture in an ambush near Cork. The Black and Tans had searched the countryside for him, and all the time he was selling eggs in the market-place disguised as a “colleen,” and so seductive in appearance that an English officer had given him the glad eye.
Mr. Mahony turned to Bertram and whispered a few words about O’Malley, with a smile of admiration and pride.
“England will never defeat Ireland with that spirit against her! O’Malley is like all the boys—just laughs at death. It was he who executed the British officer who gave the order to fire on the people in the Celtic Football ground—the bloody villain!”