Agreeably to the usage established since the League has been supreme in Ireland, not one bidder came forward at the sale. The representative of the landlord therefore remained master of the situation, and got for a few shillings the interest of the twenty-eight farmers—interest which, in certain cases, was worth £200 and more.
It now remained to evict those tenants from their farms, and take possession in their place. Let us remark that, being certain of having allowed the landlord, through the sale, to help himself to a value of five or six times his due, those men were bound to consider such an eviction a gratuitous piece of cruelty. Well knowing before-hand that the eviction would by no means be an easy task, for all Ireland breathlessly followed the course of events, Joyce singled out amongst the twenty-eight defaulters, the four tenants for whom the eviction was sure to bear the hardest character, namely, Conroy, Fahey, Broderick, and Saunders. These were all people of comfortable means, who had for many years been established on their lands, who were profoundly attached to the house where their children or grand-children had been born, and which they had themselves built, enlarged and improved at great expense; rural bourgeois rather than peasants; men that in a French country town should have been mayors, adjoints, or municipal councillors.
For each of them eviction not only meant ruin, the voluntary and definitive loss of a small fortune laboriously acquired, and which could be estimated in each case at ten or twelve times the amount of the annual rent; it was, besides, the upsetting of all their dearest habits, the destruction of home, the end of domestic felicity. “Placed between this result and the choice of paying £30 or £40, which he has in his strong box, or which he will experience no difficulty in borrowing if he has them not—what country-bred man would hesitate?” thought Joyce. “Conroy, Fahey, Broderick, and Saunders shall pay! They shall pay, and after them the others must inevitably follow suit.”
This was very sound reasoning. But Joyce calculated without the League and its agent, Father Egan. The four chosen victims did not pay. With a resolution that must really seem heroic to whoever knows the workings of a peasant’s soul, Conroy, Fahey, Broderick, and Saunders unanimously declared that the agent might expel them by force—if he could—but yield they would not.
Ah! there was a fearful struggle. It was not without the most terrible inner combat that they kept their word. At home they had the money ready; nothing could be simpler than to go and pay it. Now and then temptation waxed almost too strong. James Broderick is an old man of seventy years. One day, called to Loughrea by the tempter, he went, in company with his friend Fahey.
“Now, look here, Mr. Broderick,” Joyce said to him, “it goes to my heart to evict a good man like you from such a pretty house.... You have lived in it for these thirty years—it is the pearl of Woodford.... Let us make an arrangement about all this: you pay me down your rent with for costs, and I give you any length of time for the rest.... His lordship will even give you back the tenant-right for the price he paid himself,—fifty shillings.... Now what do you say?”...
Old Broderick wavered; he was on the point of yielding.
“Indeed, Mr. Joyce, you cannot do more than that,” ... he uttered in a trembling voice, involuntarily feeling for his pocket-book.