The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIX, Issue 21, 1 June 1922, Page 3

The Storyteller

(By William O'Brien.)

When We Were Boys

CHAPTER XXXX.— (Continued.) But now that the priest’s old weather-beaten seraph face was gone (for Father Phil had been obliged to depart to give his vote at the county election) there was a vast aching void in Ken Rohan’s heart which neither friend’s grasp, nor Bishop’s blessing, nor even the full tide of a mother’s lovo could fill ; ho scarcely dared to ask himself whence this sense of lonesomeness and soul-hunger. I daro say one of the reasons why Ireland can command a love so pasionately tender is that Erin is pictured as a woman —a weak as well as beautiful one. You may be sure it was not in this moment of distress she appeared less ravishing to one who felt the wine of youth and strength rushing to his brain. But deny it as he would, shut his eyes to it as he would, his mistress was no longer to him a mere dazzling abstraction; her eyes were deep and her flesh was palpitating; her features always ran- - into the same image, and that image not framed in the blue-black hair of the traditional “Dark Rosaleej\, ; ’ but in a flood of showery gold. He was haunted „]jgF a vague vision of a Presence which summed greedy imagination could conceive of beauty, goodness, love, and countrysummed them all up in human all-too-well-known shape; and yet the unreality of his vision forced itself upon him, mocked him, left him cold and desolate. At this moment lie had to put his hands before his eyes to keep out „the haunting, maddening sense of finding the air thrill with Mabel Westropp’s presence, of actually seeing her before him, there in that foul, dingy place of doom. “Am I going mad?” he asked himself. As a matter of fact his eyes were not in the least deceiving him. Lady Mabel was sitting by Joshua Neville’s side in a scarcely visible seat amidst the gloom cast by the shadow of the gallery overhead. “She was dressed in deep mourning, with a heavy black veil drawn completely down over her face and throat but he could not be mistaken as to the ' exquisite lines of that sylph-like figure ; ho thought he could even distinguish a pale, pale face, and eyes of heavenly blue shining out of that black shroud of hers as the bodies of saints have sometimes shone through their tombs. The paleness was there at all events, woful to see ; and her head sometimes swayed towards Joshua Neville’s .shoulder as though it could no longer support itself, light and flower-like enough though it looked on its delicate stem. The iron-master could not spare one thought for the youth in the dock away from the shrinking creature beside him. He felt miserably guilty. She had made him her confidant, placing her small white hand in his as a child might; and he had yielded, as he would have yielded if her request had been to open the largest vein in his arm. “Don’t be afraid of me,” she whispered, “I won’t cry out. I won’t do anything wrong. Trust me, I will live through it, and —and —I am not sure how I am to live unless you help me.” And, of course, he- pressed his , lips on the lily-white hand, and fobbed off the Earl (whose gout was rising to his knees) with the miserable pretext of bringing Mabel to consult a Dublin doctor. Her sweet courage on the journey had enchanted him more than all her loveliness; it was not her determination he doubted, but her whiteness and her supernatural calm terrified him beyond description. He felt like one in charge of one of those vases of Venetian glass which crumbled in the hands of a clumsy holder. - As for Ken Rohan, he no longer heard the challenges to the array, the rejoinders, surrebutters, and other solemn gibberish with which the lawyers were celebrating their Witches’ Sabbath around him. He did not even dare to lift his eyes again. They were blinded with light and happiness. The foetid court-room expanded into a rosy summerland, in which the blood-red judges, bewigged lawyers, and blue-bottle policemen wmm only so many midges buzzing in the resplendent pinched himself again and again to make sure all real. He felt that if he could only die by one swift bullet stroke, ’ho would die aLfl times a happier man than the judge The ladies who watched him through not well know what to make of him, wore an uncommonly pretty blush — a only sees, in a young nun or a true lover.

The trial went on, as Iris}!, State Trials go on age after age, as regularly as Famines* in dark anti , creepy ways such as the steaming fog that laid its slimy touch on everything in the Green Street Court-house furnished an appropriate atmosphere for. Every juror of the prisoner a creed, which was also the judges’ creed and the AttorneyGeneral’s creed, was thrust aside like a Jew in a medieval city, the sleek Jews in the judges’ and Attorney-General s gaberdines piously turning up, their eyes at the atrocious suggestion that the coincidence of all the rejected jurors being of one creed, and all the accepted ones of another, could be anything more than a coincidence. Twelve jurors were sworn who might as well have been twelve policemen turned out to throttle a burglar. . Irish State Trials finish with the swearing of the jury, not with their verdict. All the rest is a prosy novel, of which the last chapter is placed first. In the present instance the aspect of the jury-box was so unmistakable, and the evidence, moreover, so overwhelming, that the Attorney-General could afford to sail, along in balmy regions of judicial calm. “There were reasons they could all understand,” he observed, with a smile of gentle pity, “why he was specially desirous not to overstrain his duty by the turning of a hair against the unhappy young man at the Bar.” Everybody agreed that nothing could have been handsomer, and that Glascock was really a good fellow — also that he must be sure of his election, or he would never wear such an expression of genial beatitude when referring to his preposterous young adversary. There was some ground for the sarcasm of the legal wits around the library fire that Toby Glascock had thriven more by reason of what was outside his head than by reason of what was within. His sunny smile, frank face, bounteous whiskers, and hearty caressing voice were a better stock-in-trade than any he had been able to find in • calf-bound Croke-Charleses ; and he was as careful never, in good or evil fortune, to take this attractive stock out of his windows as other lawyers are to cram their mental shelves with the learned lumber of the Law Reports. The truth is that the Attorney-General was sufficiently ill at ease at this moment. The polling had taken place the previous day. Owing to the vast

extent of the county, and the difficulty of communications in those times, the declaration of the poll could not be made until late to-day. There were no telegraph wires to many of the polling-places, and such accounts as had reached him were uncomfortably conflicting. Some-entirely unlooked-for things had happened. The Drumshaughlin tenantry, who were counted the most lamblike serfs in the county had broken away from their hussar escort en masse, hooted Monsignor McGrudder in the streets, and rushed to the polls for the young rebel with flaming eyes and whirling shillelaghs. A mob led by young Neville, the Guardsman, had broken into the hotel yard where Lord Clanlaurance’s agent had his tenants stabled. like so many stalled oxen, and had borne them off through a volley of musketry from the police with trumpets sounding. There had been serious rioting elsewhere, through which Mat Murrin’s hoarse voice could be heard thundering and his eye-glass .seen flashing. Those silent, inscrutable farmers had displayed the most unaccountable tenderness for. the young rebel when the moment came to speak out. Many of the young priests had openly sided with him. But most of this was in the neighborhood where local favoritism would naturally come into play. In other districts the canons and agents had victoriously headed their battalions to the polls. There were other extensive regions still to be heard from, and the Attorney-General’s agents were as sanguine as ever of a thumping majority, though the contest had undeniably been a more serious one than they could have anticipated.

“What about this trial in the other venue, Attorney?” maliciously asked one of the -Judges, meeting him at the door of the judges’ room that morning- “Wouldn’t it be a funny thing if your Song of the Pike lost you the county?”

“Not a bit of it, judge,” retorted genial Mr. Attorney •—“no more than your lordship’s hint to the Westmeath Ribbonmen lost you your judgeship.” For Mr. Justice Murrorty in his popularity-hunting days had made a speech which sounded perilously like a Song of the Blunderbuss, and was making atonement by a - life of savage ferocity towards all who took his hints. Such is life in Ireland. The two judges from whose red robes the offended majesty

of the law glared at Ken Rohan had both of them purchased their red robes by putting up Ken Rohan’s principles for sale in market overt; and the bland Attorney-General who uttered his brief-ful of well-fed horror of the prisoner’s treasons against his sovereign had. a sneaking feeling somewhere in the very innermost recesses of his heart that if this were not a world of humbug the prisoner would be stepping out of the dock to kick him.

The Attorney-General, undoubtedly, did his spiriting gently. His sleek platitudes about the criminality of rebellion and the sacred interests of society were delivered with an apologetic drooping of the eyelids and a certain genial, semi-demi-wink-lik© eye upon the dock, as who should say: “My dear fellow, you understand, of course, that all this twaddle is briefed to me and has to be got through; it will involve unpleasant consequences, no doubt, for you ; but I am sure you are too’ »good a fellow not to feel how much more uncomfortable a business it must be for me, with that infernal -Pike Song for ever ringing in my earsand a devilish good thing it was, by the way, if those rascals wouldn’t insist upon making it immortal” The principal evidence consisted of letters in Ken Rohan’s handwriting found on the premises of the suppressed newspaper, and tracing to him the authorshigMJf the fiery rebel ballad which had precipitated the suppression.

“You don’t intend to rely upon the writing of a rebel ballad alone as conclusive evidence ,of high treason, Attorney?” growled Mr. Justice Murrorty, who had not forgiven the thrust about the whirling rhetoric of his own Bohemian days. The junior bar grinned furtively, and looked at Toby Glascock’s face.

“Certainly not, m’ lud; your ludship, with the perspicacity which distinguishes you among judges in a scarcely less remarkable degree than the kindheartedness which endears you among friends, has quite accurately anticipated what I was about to say,” said the Attorney-General with undiminished sweetness. “This ’ correspondence we rely upon as establishing the prisoner’s connection with the leaders of this abominable conspiracy but we do not stop there. Out of the mouth of one of his own accomplices —one of .his own dupes—it will be our melancholy duty to establish the prisoner’s actual participation in scenes of insurrection and of bloodshed.”

The , prisoner became vaguely conscious of a deep susurrus of popular interest such as might have thrilled the Roman Amphitheatre when ii fasting lion was turned into the arena. He felt himself wrenched painfully out of his beautiful dreams. The lucent empyrean heaven in which ho had been floating faded out, and in its place loomed up through the clammy yellow fog a figure in the witness-* chair which seemed to have risen like an ugly exhalation. The eyes had a gleam of. blood in them ; the teeth were those of a wild animal fresh from some bloody prey ; the very hair of the monster seemed to have been steeped in murder.

Perhaps it was indignation at being torn from his delicious dreamland that moved Ken Rohan, even more than his repulsion for the trade of the informer but he thought he had never before seen an object so loathsome, so satanic. He had seen precisely the same object often before, however; for the squat figure, blazing hair, and vermilion bulb of nose now, dully burning through the

sodden air were those of Dawley.

From the moment the informer, horrible-looking as if the hell of remorse and alcohol within him were oozing through the pores of his flesh, began his story, all was over. Mr. Justice Murrorty, whose handsome, imperious, cruel-jawed head resembled one of those seen on the coins of the later Roman Emperors, was subject to keen internal torments, and dashed into the work of hunting dowp the prisoner as other men take morning gallops to stir up a torpid liver. I have not the heart to tell how he and fumed in a holy rage for the interests of j]&HMB how he championed the informer against every able raid of the cross-examining counsel-how the double-dyed murdered and perjurer with actually saluted the red-headed little demon witflffiraHn of “saviour of his country” —and what an abyss and ruin suddenly opened under Ken Rohan’s fee^HEH

torturing pictures of a dying father, of a weeping m* of a lost cause, and of . a hideous black framework a| strangling body, and a grave underneath the flags of

little exercise-yard where he had learned with a curious fascination fourteen murderers were already sleeping in their quicklime shrouds. Pray Heaven, gracious reader, that nobody you love may ever know what dismal eternities may be crushed into the moments after twelve men retire into their jury-room to write down the word which, in our own land and in our own day, has bruised many a thousand young lives as fairly blossoming as Ken Rohan's, and lacerated many a thousand hearts as tender as his mother's, and broken many a thousand as stalwart forms * as that of the stout old miller ! Not that everybody in court could not have written down the verdict before the jury retired, and sworn to it. But, in a country where judicial decency, like certain simple-minded African belles, is more particular about its necklaces than about more important articles of toilette, a political jury always pride themselves on writing the word "Guilty" with as much leisurely dignity as if they were engaged in illuminating it in gold and colors. They wera illuminating it with their glowing tobaccopipes, at all events, and while they were so engaged a telegraph messenger arrived with two messages, one of which was handed from policeman to policeman into the dock, and the other into the hands of the Attorney-General. A buzz of excitement went through the court-room. Everybody felt the telegrams announced the verdict in the other venue. A mist swam before Ken Rohan's eyes. The address upon the envelope appeared to dance and stagger before him. It was: "Kennedy Rohan, Esquire, M.P., The Dock, Green St." His hand trembled with incredulous joy as he tore it open. The telegram was from Mat Murrin, and was in these words: "Declaration of the Pollßohan, 7,245; Glascock, 1,360. God bless you, old boy! That is a verdict worth living for, and worth dying for." (To be concluded.)