Two hundred men met at the trysting place, close to the "Big Meadows." They were kept waiting for some time; impatience began to set in, and demoralization is the child of impatience. At last the head centre appeared; he had five guns for the whole party. Then the men saw that their hopes were betrayed. Most of them quietly dispersed towards their homes. That night Mat was seized in his bed, and within a few minutes afterwards was in goal. He felt that the game was up, that all his bright hopes, like those of many another noble Irish heart before him, had ended in farcical nothingness. Disaster followed upon disaster. When he made his appearance in court he saw upon the witness table one of his most trusted friends, who was about to give the evidence that would ensure his conviction.
A final outrage was in store for him. The Government had resolved, when once it had entered upon the campaign against the conspiracy, to pursue it with vigor, and judges were selected who might be relied upon to show the accused no justice during the trial, and no mercy after the conviction. Crowe, who had been made a judge shortly after his last election for Ballybay, was naturally chosen as the chief and most useful actor in this drama. During all the years that had elapsed since his treason he had distinguished himself, even above all the other judges of the country, in the unscrupulous violence of his hostility to all popular movements. Trial before him came to be regarded as certainty of conviction. The fearlessness of the man made him inaccessible to the threats that were everywhere hurled against him, and his rage became the fiercer and his violence the more relentless on the day after he found a threatening letter under a plate on his own table. He brought to his task all the ferocity of the apostate. Under all his apparent independence, his quick vanity and his hot temper made him sensitive to attack, and the Fenian Press had made him the chief target of its most vehement and most constant invective.
Mat Blake was known as one of the bitterest writers and speakers of the movement, and some of the writings in which he had attacked Crowe displayed a familiarity with the incidents of Ballybay elections which could only have come from the pen of one who had been intimately associated with those struggles.
The two men now stood face to face—the one on the bench and the other in the dock. Crowe did not allow himself to betray any sign of previous acquaintance with the prisoner before him. The jury was selected; every man who might be supposed to have the least sympathy with National movements was rigorously excluded from the box, and Mat was tried by twelve men, of whom nine were Orangemen and the other three belonged to that Catholic-Whig bourgeoisie against which he had always waged unsparing war. Anthony Cosgrave was the foreman. Mat was convicted, and sentenced to seven years' penal servitude.
The sufferings he underwent during this period I will not attempt to describe. After a very short stay in Ireland he was transferred to Portland, and there the English warders exhausted upon him all the insolence and cruelty of ignorant and triumphant enemies. One suffering, however, was in his case somewhat mitigated. He had not a large appetite, and the prison food, though coarse, was sufficient for his wants. With the generosity which characterized him, he was even ready to divide his food with those whose appetites were more exacting. Among his companions were two men, tall, robust, red-haired, who belonged to a stock of Southern farmers, and who were possessed of the gigantic strength, the huge frame, and the sound digestion of Cork ploughmen. Every day these hapless creatures complained of hunger and of cold, and Mat and Charles Reilly, another member of the Irish People staff, sometimes found a sombre pleasure in finding and gathering snails for them. Whenever either of them brought a snail to Meehan or to Sheil the famished men would swallow it eagerly, without even stopping to take off the shell. Meehan is now a prominent member of the Dynamite Party in New York. Sheil became insane shortly after his release, and threw himself into the Liffey.
One day, after four years' imprisonment, the Governor called Mat into his room and told him that he was free. He was transferred to Milbank, then he was supplied with a suit of clothes several times too large for him, and he went out and by the Thames, and gazed on that noble stream with the eyes of a free man.
He wandered aimlessly and listlessly along, unable yet to appreciate the full joy of his restoration to liberty. As he was passing over Westminster Bridge he was suddenly stopped by a man whom he had known in the ranks of the organization, and whom the fortune of war had not swept into gaol with the rest. The stranger looked at Mat for a few moments; gazed on the hollow eyes, the pale cheeks, and the worn frame, and, unable to restrain his emotions, burst into tears. This was the first indication Mat received of the terrible change that imprisonment had wrought in his appearance. The next day he set out for Ballybay.
Meanwhile, vast changes seemed about to come over Ireland. The Fenian conspiracy had been the death-knell of the triumphant cynicism and corruption that had reigned over the country in the years succeeding the treason of Crowe. The name of Mr. Butt, as the leader of a new movement, was beginning to be spoken of. An agitation had been started which demanded a radical settlement of the land question. Demonstrations were taking place in almost every county, and the people were united, enthusiastic, and hopeful. Several of the worst of the landlords had already been brought to their knees, and there had been a considerable fall in the value of landed property. The serfs were passing from the extremity of despair and demoralization into the other extreme of exultant and sometimes cruel triumph.
Even the town of Ballybay was beginning to be stirred, and the farmers all around joined the new organization in large numbers.
By a curious coincidence a monster demonstration was announced in Ballybay for the very day of Mat's arrival.