CHAPTER XV.
VOILA CE QUI FAIT QUE VOTRE FILLE EST MUETTE.
Madame Swetchine says: “The wrongs which the heart resents most keenly are impalpable and invisible.” We may parody this, and say, with equal truth, that the troubles most difficult to bear are frequently those which, to indifferent observers, seem scarcely worth mention. There is dignity, and a certain stimulating excitement, in great affliction and great wrong; but a petty persecution, which we would fain treat with contempt, but which, in spite of us, pierces with small, envenomed points to our very hearts, is capable of testing our utmost endurance. Who does not know how one malicious, intriguing woman can poison a whole community, break friendship that would have stood the test of death, and destroy a confidence that seemed as firm as the hills? The smiling malice, the affected candor, the smooth insinuation, the more than infantine innocence—happy he who has not learned by bitter experience these tactics of the devil’s sharpshooters!
Of such a nature was the earlier stage of the persecution suffered by the Catholics of Seaton. Servants were daily insulted by mistresses less well-bred than themselves. They had to swallow a gibe with their Friday’s eggs or fish; they were entertained with slanderous stories regarding the priest they loved and reverenced. This was, of course, without provocation. Who ever knew an Irish servant-girl who attacked the religion or irreligion of her employers? Workingmen could not go
through the streets to and from their work without being forced to listen to revilings of their church. This was carried to such an extent that they soon found themselves obliged to relinquish their open-air lounging-places, where they had smoked and talked after the day’s work was done, and shut themselves into their houses. Nor were they allowed to remain in peace there. Nearly all the Irish lived on one street, running from the bridge up the west side of the river, and called Irish Lane. When it was found that they would not come out to be insulted, the mob that gathered in the streets every evening marched up this lane, calling out to the Irish, challenging, taunting them. But not one word or act of retaliation could they provoke to give them an excuse for the violence which they were thirsting to commit. Father Rasle had given his people stringent orders to remain in their houses, and make no reply, no matter what was said to them, and to defend themselves only if their houses were broken into. They obeyed him with astonishing docility.
When, later, the people of Seaton found themselves covered with disgrace before the country for their outrages on Catholics, they strove to throw the odium on “a few rowdies,” or on workingmen from other towns employed in the Seaton ship-yards; and in a sketch of the town in the History of Maine, written since that time, the Catholics are accused of being themselves the cause of their own troubles. Both these statements
are false. In the town-meeting, which endorsed and even suggested every outrage that was committed, ministers and town-officers made inflammatory speeches from the same platform with any ignorant adventurer who might hope to raise himself to notice by reviling the church. Those of the townspeople who were not active members of the mob were, at least, passive lookers-on; and when, at length, acts of violence began, some of the most prominent citizens went to see the windows of the Catholic church and of the priest’s house broken, as they would have gone to any other amusing show. But we anticipate.
The prime instrument in this movement was the Seaton Herald, which Carl Yorke had left in a sinking condition. The Know-Nothings, wanting an organ, bought it for a song, and put into the editorial chair a man well fitted for the work. Under such superintendence, the paper rose to an infamous popularity. It was no longer a question of religious freedom, and law, and order, but of common decency. Every week the names of quiet, respectable people were dragged into its columns, that festered with lies—their names only enough veiled to escape the law, but not enough to conceal the identity. In a city, there is some escape from this disgusting notoriety—one can hide from it; but in a small town there is no escape. Everybody is known to everybody, and one lives as in a glass case.
Mr. Yorke looked over one of these papers—“looked holes through it,” Clara said—then threw it into the fireplace, dropped a lighted match on it, and watched its burning with his nostrils compressed, like one who smells a noxious scent. “Don’t send another number of your disgraceful paper to me,” he wrote to the editor;
but vainly, for the paper came as before, and was regularly taken in the tongs and put into the kitchen fire, except when Betsey or Patrick slyly rescued it for their own private reading.