Protestants, moreover, commonly allege the absence of any mention of St. Peter's voyage to Rome in the Acts of the Apostles, and the absence of any reference to him, either in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans or in those he wrote from Rome. The silence of the Acts is easily explained. After the council of Jerusalem, the writer relates only the missionary labors of St. Paul, so that we could not expect any mention of St. Peter's voyages. Dr. Browne infers from Acts xxviii. 22, that "the Jews of Rome had had no communication with any chief teacher among the Christians." This inference is not borne out by the text, "We desire to hear from thee what thou thinkest; or as concerning this sect, we know that it is everywhere opposed." The obvious meaning is that the Jews of Rome knowing that Paul was a Pharisee learned in the law, wished to hear what he had to say in favor of the new religion. They must have looked on St. Peter as a Galilean fisherman, who had no right to attempt to expound the law and the prophets. It is puerile for Dr. Browne to allege that they should have heard him with respect because he was the apostle of the circumcision; for, of what importance could this title be in their eyes, if they did not believe in Him who sent the apostles?
If St. Peter went to Rome in the reign of Claudius, he certainly was afterward absent from the city, as we find him after this period at the council of Jerusalem. His absence from Rome accounts for the fact that St. Paul does not salute him in his Epistle to the Romans, a straw at which some Protestant writers clutch with great avidity. The great respect with which St. Paul speaks of the Roman Church, whose faith, he says, was spoken of in the whole world, agrees with the supposition that St. Peter had already preached there. On these words, [Footnote 115] "For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift, that ye may be strengthened; that is, I may be comforted together with you, by that which is common to us both, your faith and mine." Theodoret remarks as follows: "Because the great Peter had first given them the doctrine of the gospel, he said merely,'that ye may be strengthened.' I do not wish, he says, to bring a new doctrine to you, but to confirm that which you have received, and to water the trees which have already been planted." [Footnote 116]
[Footnote 115: Ch. i. 11, 12.][Footnote 116: In locum.]
The words certainly indicate that the faith had already been firmly established by some teacher of high rank, and are a very apposite commentary on Dr. Browne's reason why the Jews, some years afterward, were anxious to hear St. Paul. We cannot really understand what hallucination led him to quote these words to show that St. Paul writes much as "if no apostle had ever been amongst the Romans." But we admire his prudence in giving purely a reference, not the words of the text. His other reference to Rom. xv. 15-24 is even more unlucky. St. Paul therein says plainly that he generally preached, "not where Christ was named," lest he should build on another man's foundation."For which cause," he adds, "I have been much hindered from coming to you." Therefore some other apostlehadpreached to the Romans. He even goes on to say that he hoped to be gratified in his desire of seeing them,when on his way to Spain, so that it is plain that he, though apostle of the Gentiles, considered there was no necessity for his making a journey to Rome on purpose to instruct the Roman Church. St. Paul, then, writes very much as if an apostlehadbeen with the Romans. Whatever else Dr. Browne does, he ought to quote Scripture fairly. St. Paul's allusions, obscure though they may be to us, were, of course, clear to those to whom they were written. No familiar letter can be fully understood without taking into account the facts which, being well known to those to whom he writes, the author merely alludes to in a passing way.
The letters which St. Paul wrote from Rome were all written during his first stay there, with the probable exception of the second to Timothy. Colossians iv. II, and 2 Timothy iv. 16, are quoted to show that St. Peter was not at Rome, else he would have stood by St. Paul. But the epistle to the Colossians was written during St. Paul's first imprisonment, when St. Peter, as we have seen, must have been absent, and in the second to Timothy he speaks expressly of his "first defence." Most writers think he refers to his first imprisonment. Others suppose him to speak of a preliminary hearing before Nero, during his second imprisonment. Admitting this interpretation, he cannot include St. Peter, who was his fellow-prisoner, in the list of those who had forsaken him. The words apply to persons at large, who had influence with the authorities, which they did not use.
We have thus fully examined all that Protestants allege concerning the silence of the New Testament. The candid reader will see that there is nothing in the sacred pages to contradict the historical facts we have established; the allusions of St. Paul to the instruction of the Romans in the faith by a teacher of high rank, and the interpretation of the wordBabylonin St. Peter's first letter, which has come down to us from the apostolic age, must be counted in their favor.
It is on historical evidence that the case must rest; and on it, as we have rehearsed it, we are satisfied to submit it to unprejudiced criticism. The testimony of the apostolic age, and the two immediately following, is conclusive; it cannot be explained away; much less can it be impeached. We must give up all belief in well-authenticated history, or else admit that St. Peter went to Rome, founded the church there, and was its first bishop, and there died a martyr of Christ.
"O Roma felix, quae duorum principumEs consecrata glorioso sanguineHorum cruore purpurata ceterasExcellis orbis una pulchritudines.""O happy Rome! whom the great Apostles' bloodFor ever consecrates while ages flow:Thou, thus empurpled, art more beautifulThan all that doth appear most beautiful below."
"O Roma felix, quae duorum principumEs consecrata glorioso sanguineHorum cruore purpurata ceterasExcellis orbis una pulchritudines.""O happy Rome! whom the great Apostles' bloodFor ever consecrates while ages flow:Thou, thus empurpled, art more beautifulThan all that doth appear most beautiful below."
Note By The Editor On The Chronology Of St. Peter's Life.
Eusebius says that St. Peter established his see at Antioch in the last year of Tiberius, who died March fifteenth, A.D. 37. It was probably, therefore, in the year 36; and St. Ignatius, the second successor of St. Peter in that see; St. John Chrysostom, who had been a priest there; Origen and St. Jerome, as well as Eusebius, state that he governed that church seven years; which probably means, not that his episcopate was just of that length, but, that seven calendar years were included (the first and the last partially) in it.At any rate, this would make the establishment of his see in Rome in A.D. 42 or 43; and the day celebrated by the church is January 18th. Now, Eusebius, St. Jerome, Cassiodorus, and others say that SS. Peter and Paul were put to death in the fourteenth year of Nero, that is, in A.D. 67; and their martyrdom is celebrated on June 29th. This gives twenty-four and a half or twenty-five and a half years for St. Peter's Roman episcopate, or twenty-five years in the sense that the Antiochan was seven, if he came to Rome in 43; in which case he may even have established his see at Antioch in 37.
St. John Chrysostom says that St. Paul's life after his conversion was thirty-five years; which would make that event to have occurred in A.D. 32 or 33. He himself says (Gal. i.) that three years afterward he went to Jerusalem, and thence to Tarsus, as is also stated in Acts ix. From this place he was called to preach to the church at Antioch, as mentioned in Acts xi.; and this visit, which could not have much preceded the establishment of St. Peter's see there, may well have been in A.D. 35 or 36, agreeing with the chronology given above.
These dates do not agree with that commonly assigned for the crucifixion; but numerous evidences show that this occurred in the year 29. As late a date as A.D. 31 might, however, be allowed.
It was the saddest, saddest face I ever saw.
She stood before the stove in my front office, on that dark December day, and the steam from her wet, heated garments almost concealed her from my sight. Yet the first glimpse I caught of her, through the partition door, excited my interest to an unusual degree; and, though I saw her not again for a half hour, that one glance fixed her features in my memory as indelibly as they are printed there to-day.
It was term time, and the second return-day of the term. For ten days my eyes and brain had both been crowded with all that varied detail of business which sessions aggregate upon the hands and conscience of a rising lawyer; and the musty retinue ofassumpsit, ejectment, andscire-faciashad nearly vexed and worn out the little life I had at the beginning. But the criminal week, which was my peculiar sphere, was close at hand, and I looked to its exciting, riskful cases as a relief from the dull, dreary current of civil forms and practice.
The little room I dignified with the name of "front office" was filled, as far as seats went, with rough backwoodsmen, witnesses on behalf of a gentleman who occupied with me the snugly carpeted "sanctum" in the rear. While we discussed together the points of strength or weakness to be tested at the impending trial, the voices of the rude laborers reached us brokenly, and more than once words fell upon my ear which made me tremble for the sensibilities of the lonely woman who was with them.They meant no harm, those bluff, hearty men. A tear from her drooping eyes would have unmanned them. But they were not well-bred, nor tender to the weakness of the other sex. My poor client, as she afterward became, stood while they sat, kept silence while they laughed and jeered each other. It was not their fault that they never minded her. They were not hypocrites, that's all.
At length I had the happiness to see the door close on the last of them, and, after arranging the maps and diagrams which would be needed on the morrow, I called to the stranger to come in. She obeyed, hesitatingly, and then, for the first time, I saw that she belonged to that most forlorn and pitiable of all the many classes who throng around our mining districts, the recent Irish emigrant. The very clothes she wore were the same with which she dressed herself in the green isle far away, and her voice and manner had not yet caught that flippancy and pertness which pass among the longer landed for tokens of American independence and equality. She was certainly very poor, or the rough, wintry winds would not have been permitted to toss her long, black hair in tangled masses around her shoulders, or drop their melting snowflakes on her uncovered head. My chivalric interest died without time to groan, and whatever thought of profit or romance in assisting her I might have had, at the first sight of her, perished at the same instant. But I saw poverty and sorrow, and I determined in my heart, before she told her errand, that my life of legal labor should embrace at least one act done thoroughly and for nothing.
Her story was a short one. Her husband and herself had lived in a neighboring village. Others of their own people dwelt around them, and among these was an old woman and her son. No difficulty, that she knew of, had ever risen between her family and theirs. But, a few days before, as her husband was gathering fuel by the roadside, these two had rushed out on him, and in cold blood murdered him. The son had fled, and the murderer's mother, with barred doors and windows, forbade the vicinage of friend or foe. The broken-hearted wife, urged on to take such vengeance as the law afforded, had come to me and asked my counsel and assistance.
It was of little use to question her. Like most of her peculiar class, her mind could entertain but one idea, and that, in some form or other, recurred in answer to every inquiry I could make. Satisfying myself, however, that a murder had really been committed, and taking down such names and dates as were necessary for the initial steps of prosecution, I sent her home, with the assurance that justice should be done her, and her dead husband's ghost avenged.
The warrant was issued, the arrest made, the indictment found, the trial finished. There was no doubt of guilt. The murder was committed in the broad light of day, and many eyes had seen it. The counsel for the defence had felt the untenability of his position before a tithe of the evidence was in, and slipped down from innocence to justifiability, until his last hope for the prisoner was in the allegation of insanity, late suggested and faintly urged. It was useless. The twelve inexorable men brought in their verdict of "wilful murder," and Bridget Davanagh was sentenced to be hanged by the neck till she was dead.
It has never been my custom to follow cases, on which the solemn judgment of the law has been pronounced, beyond those immediate consequences of that judgment which the connection between a lawyer and his client has compelled me to superintend. But there was something in this case which both attracted and disquieted me, and one day in vacation I found myself at the grated prison-door, seeking admission to the cell of the condemned. The old woman received me quietly. She seemed to have forgotten me, or, at least, how active a part I had taken in the proceedings which had ended in dooming her to a shameful death. She was taciturn and moody; and, the longer I remained, the more satisfied I became that her mind was now unsettled, if it had not been before. I went several times after that, and gradually, by kind words and the gift of such simple comforts as aged matrons most desire, I won her confidence so far that, in her faltering, disconnected way, she told me all that sad history of woe and wrong and suffering which had brought an untimely grave to Michael Herican, and a felon's fate to her. It was one of those tales of falsity and sorrow which we cannot hear too often, and whose moral none of us can learn too well.
The little village of Easky, in the County Sligo, was, when this present century was young, one of those lonesome, scanty-peopled hamlets whose very loneliness and isolation render them more dear and homelike to their few inhabitants. The waters of the Northern Ocean foamed about the rocks where its fisher-boats were moored. The feet of its rambling children trod the rough paths and crumpled the grey masses of the wild Slieve-Gamph hills. Thus hemmed in between the mountains and the sea, it was almost separated from the world. The white sails that now and then flitted across the far horizon, and the slow, lazy car that twice a month brought over his majesty's mail-bags from Dromore, were all that Easky ever had to tell it that there were nations and kingdoms on the earth, or that its own precipices on the one side, and its weed-strewn rocks upon the other, did not embrace the whole of human joys and sorrows.
In this solitary village the forefathers of Patrick Carrol had dwelt for immemorial years. So far back as tradition went they had been fishermen, and the last remaining scion now followed the ancestral calling. He was a sort of hero among his fellow-villagers. True, he was as poor as the poorest of them all, and had no personal boast save of his vigorous arms and honest heart. But his father, contrary to the custom of his race, had refused to lay his bones within an ocean bed, and had died fighting in the bloody streets of Killala. All victims of '98 were canonized by those rude freemen, and the mantle of honor fell from the father upon the children, and gave to Patrick Carrol a deserved and well-maintained pre-eminence. And so, when Bridget Deery became his wife, the whole hamlet agreed that the village favorite had found her proper husband, and, when the little Mary saw the light, the christening holiday was kept by every neighbor, old or young.
Four years of perfect happiness flew by. Death or misfortune came to other families, but not to theirs. The little hoarded wealth, hid away in the dark corner, grew yearly greater. Health and affection dwelt unremittingly upon the hearthstone, and the hearts of the father and mother were as full of gratitude as the heart of the child was of merriment and glee. But the four years had an end, and carried with them, into the trackless past, the sunshine of their lives.One long, long summer day the wife sat among the rocks, watching for her husband's boat, and playing with the prattler at her side. The boat came not. The sun went down. The gathering clouds in the offing loomed up threateningly. The hoarse northwesters felt their way across the waters, and whistled in her ears, as she clasped the child to her bosom and hurried home out of the storm. As the gale strengthened with the darkness, she fell upon her knees, and all that wakeful night besought the Mother and the saints to keep her baby's father from the awful danger. In vain; for when the morning dawned, the waves washed up his oars and helm upon the beach, and an hour later his drowned corse was found beneath the broken crags of Anghris Head.
For the first few years after that fatal shock the widowed mother lived she knew not how. One by one the treasured silver pieces went, till destitution stared her in the face. The charity of her neighbors outdid their means, but even that could not keep her from actual suffering, and work for the lone woman there was absolutely none. What wonder was it, then, that, when the flowers had bloomed three times above the peaceful bed of Patrick Carrol, his widow, more for her child's sake than her own, consented to violate the sanctity of her broken heart, and become the wife of Bernard Davanagh?
Bernard was a bold, reckless, wilful man, and both the mother and the child soon felt the difference between the dead father and the living. As time passed on, and the boy Bernard was born, the passions of the man grew stronger, and cruel words, and still more cruel blows, became the daily portion of the helpless three. Oh! how often did the widow yearn to lie down with her children by her dead husband's side, in the drear churchyard, and be at peace for ever. But notwithoutthem. No, not even to be united with the lost, could she have left them, and so they clung together, closer and closer, as the years rolled on—knowing little of life except its dark page of sorrow.
There never yet was a life without some ray of joy, and, even in the midnight darkness which hung around the childhood of Mary Carrol, there were faint gleams of happiness. Next door but one to their poor cot lived James Herican. He too was a fisherman, and, in better days, had been Patrick Carrol's most intimate and faithful friend. He had remained such to the widow and the fatherless, and, but for him, the family of Bernard Davanagh also might sometimes have perished from want and cold. He was the father of one child, the boy Michael, older by two years than Mary, and doubly endeared to his heart by the mother's early death. The gossips of Easky had wondered, in their simple way, why James Herican and Bridget Carrol did not marry, but the memory of his dead wife and his dead friend forbade the one ever to entertain the thought, and the poor widow was as far from wishing it as he. They were happier as they were; he, by his kindness and true Christian charity, laying up heavenly treasures, which, as the second husband of a second wife, he never could accumulate; she, keeping ever fresh and pure the one love of her maiden's heart, the one hope of reunion in the skies. What, and how different, the end had been, if they had married, the eye of the Eternal can alone discern.
The friendship of these parents descended to the children. In all their sports, their rambles, their labors, (for in that toiling hamlet even tender childhood labored,) Michael Herican and Mary Carrol were together. When her half-brother, eight years younger than herself, grew into boyhood, Michael was his champion against the impositions of larger boys, and taught him all those arts of wood and water craft which village youth so ardently aspire to, and so aptly learn. It could not happen otherwise than that these constantly recurring kindnesses should beget firm and fast affection, and knit together these young hearts in bonds difficult, if not impossible, to sunder.
It may have been the law of nature, it may have been the chastening of God, that Michael Herican and Mary Carrol should come, in later years, to love each other. It was simply fitting, to all human sight, that it should be so; and it was so. The father and the mother thanked God for it, day by day, and bestowed upon them such tokens of encouragement as the bashful lovers could comfortably receive. The boy Bernard, when he heard of it, (and there could be no secrets in Easky,) threw up his cap for joy, and the old village crones for once smiled on the prospects of a happiness they had never known. Only Davanagh appeared displeased, but his abuse of the poor girl had been so extreme for years that it could scarcely suffer any increase, and all the influence he exerted over her or them was by his ruthless fist and cursing tongue. This at last ceased; for ears less patient than her own received his stinging insults, and a blow, quicker than his drunken arm could parry, stretched him upon the ground to rise no more.
Mary Carrol reached her twentieth birthday. She was a frail, delicate girl, below the middle height, and with that beautiful but strange union of large blue eyes and pearly complexion with jet black hair and lashes which tells at once of the pure Irish blood. We should not have called her handsome; perhaps no one would, except those who loved her, and in whose sight no disfigurement or disease could have made her homely. But she was one of those superior natures which solitude and suffering must unite with Christian culture to produce; and the whole neighborhood, for this, and not for her beauty, claimed her as its favorite and charm. Michael had grown to be a stalwart man, half a head taller than his sire, and his fellows said that none among them promised better for diligence and success than he. His devotion to Mary Carrol knew no bounds, and she, in turn, cherished scarcely a thought apart from him. Her mother had rapidly grown old and broken. Grief, and that yearning for the dead which is stronger than any sorrow, had made her an aged woman long before her time, and the fond daughter, between her and the one hope of her young life, had no third wish or joy. Her only trouble was for her brother. The wild elements of his father's nature became more apparent in him every day, and, though he loved his mother and half-sister with an almost inhuman passionateness, they frequently found it impossible to restrain his turbulent and curbless will. The stern control of a seafaring life seemed to be their only chance of saving him, and so, at little more than twelve years old, he was torn away from home and friends and sent out on a coasting merchantman to be subdued. This parting nearly broke his mothers's heart, but her discipline of suffering had been borne too long and patiently for her to rebel now. It was only another drop to her full cup of bitterness, when, a few months later, news came, by word of mouth from a sailor in Dromore, that the merchantman had foundered in the stormy Irish Sea.
It would be beyond the power of human pen to describe how these lone women now clung to Michael Herican. His father went down to the grave in peace, and he had none but them, as they had none but him. Already the one looked on him as a husband and the other as a son. When a few more successful voyages were over, and when the humble necessaries, which even an Easky maid could not become a wife without providing, were completed, the benediction of the church was to fulfil the promise of their hearts, and give them irrevocably to each other in the sight of God and man.
It was an ill-starred day for Michael Herican and the Carrols when the Widow Moran and her daughter came to live in Easky. Pierre Moran, deceased, had been a small shopkeeper in Sligo, where he had amassed a little competence, and, now that he was dead, his widow returned to her native village to pass her remaining life among her former neighbors. There were few among them who had not known more or less about the reckless girl who ran away with the half-French half-Irish shopman, twenty years ago, and her name and memory was none of the best among those virtuous villagers. But she cared less for this because she had enough of filthy lucre to command exterior respect, and it was better, so she thought, to be highest among the lowly than to be low among the high. In coming to Easky she had had two ends in view: to queen it over her former associates, and to secure a steady and good husband for her daughter. Kitty Moran was like her mother, but without her mother's faults. She was a girl of dash and spirit, and with a pride as quick and a nature as impressible as her mother was emotionless. She was a thorough brunette, with a brunette's violence and passion, with a brunette's power to love and power to hate. In actual beauty no maiden of the neighborhood could vie with her, and she had just enough of city polish and refinement to give her an appearance of superiority to those around her. Between her and Mary Carrol the angels would not have hesitated in choosing—unless, indeed, they were those ancient sons of God who took wives from among the daughters of men because they saw that they were fair, and then, like men, they would have chosen wrongly.
It was not many days before the Widow Moran heard of Michael Herican, or many weeks before she had decided that he should be the husband of her child. True, she knew of his betrothal, for his name was rarely spoken unconnected with the name of Mary Carrol, but this made no difference. The pale-faced step-daughter of the drunken Davanagh was of no consequence to her, and to the right or wrong of her designs she never gave a thought. Whatever she wished, she determined to have. Whatever she determined to have, she set herself industriously to secure. So when she marketed, it was Michael's boat from which she purchased. When there was a message to send to Sligo, or packages from thence to be brought home to her, it was Michael's boat that carried it. When she had work to be done around her cottage, it waited until Michael had an idle day, and then he was hired to do it. Well skilled, as every woman is, in arts like these, she used her knowledge and her chances all too well.
It is but just to say that Kitty Moran had no share in her mother's wicked plans. She was young and gay. Michael Herican was the finest young man in the village. It was not disagreeable to her to watch him and to talk with him, as he worked by her directions in the little garden, or to sit beside him at their noontide meal. Unconsciously, she grew to miss him when he was away at sea, to have a welcome for him in her heart when he came home, to look for him with impatience when she knew that his vocation brought him back to her. Before she was aware of it, she loved him; and when she realized her love, she threw herself into it, as her one absorbing passion, without a dream of its results or a suspicion of her error. She would not, for an empire, have deliberately wronged the patient girl whom, by the stern law of contraries, she had already learned to cherish, but to her love there was no limit, no moderation. She could not help loving Michael Herican, and no more could she mete out or restrain her love. So, when it mastered her, itwasher master, and her reason and her conscience were whirled away before the rushing tide of passion like bubbles on the bosom of a cataract.
How Michael Herican came to love this new maiden not even he himself could tell. Rochefoucault says, "It is in man's power neither to love nor to refrain from loving." And false as this may be as a general law of life, there are cases in which it appears almost divinely true. It was so in his. He simply could not help it. When he compared the calm, deep, tried affection of the heart that had been his for years with the tumultuous outburst of this impetuous soul, his judgment taught him there ought to be no such comparison between them. He never had one doubt as to his duty. He fought nobly and manfully against the spell that seemed to be upon him. He would gladly have left Easky, and have stretched his voyages beyond the northern seas; but he could not leave Mary and her mother there alone. He thought of hastening his marriage, thereby to put an end to all possibility of faithlessness, (and this is what he should have done,) but he had no reason for it that he dared to give. It was a fearful trial for him, and would have bred despair in stronger hearts than his, if such there be. He became lax and careless in his business, harsh and moody in his intercourse with others. A few tattling croakers, here and there, wiser than the rest, laid the evil at the Widow Moran's door; but they could give no proof when asked for it, and the frowns and chidings of the neighborhood soon put them down.
In this way things went on for months. The day drew near when the wedding-feast should usher in a new life to the waiting pair. It was a drawing near of doom to him. The enchantment had not weakened by indulgence. The siren's song was as soft and seductive as when its first notes took possession of his soul. Feeling as he did toward Kathleen Moran, he would not marry Mary Carrol, although from his heart of hearts he could have sworn that his love for her had known no change or diminution. Nor did he dare to tell her that the fascinations of the stranger had enchained him; for he knew that he was all she had, and all she loved. But it could not go on thus always, and he knew it. Something must be done. Had it been the mere sacrifice of himself, he would not have hesitated for a moment. As little did he hesitate between marrying where he did not love supremely, and not marrying at all.He had a conscience, and when his conscience decided between these, and told him that he must not marry Mary Carrol, it compelled him also to go to her and in plain words tell her so.
It almost killed her. The shock was so great, at the moment, mightily though she strove to command herself, that her life was in immediate danger. After a while she rallied again, a very ghost to what she had been, though little else before. Her mother bore the blow less calmly. She could not understand the powerlessness of the one to save himself, or the self-sacrifice of the other, which gave up her life's last greatest hope without a murmur. She felt the disappointment keenly, but the injury more. Dispositions, that through all her sorrows had never been apparent in her character, began to show themselves. She grew stem and vengeful in place of her old meekness and submission, and brooded over their cruel wrong until it became a second nature with her to impute to Michael Herican all her troubles, and curse him in her heart as the destroyer of her child.
Of course all Easky soon knew the grief that had come to Bridget Davanagh's household; and, not unnaturally, most of them sided with her in her condemnation of Michael Herican. They could not understand, they would not have believed, that he was under the dominion of a passion which he could neither escape nor resist. To them there was no fascination in the Widow Moran's daughter, and they loved the mother too little for them to suppose that any one could love the child. It was a hard lot for her, poor girl, to hear their cutting censures passed upon her as the cause of Mary Carrol's sufferings; for the people of that uncultivated neighborhood did not care to conceal their bitterness beneath soft-spoken words, and did not hesitate to tell her to her face all that they felt concerning her. Nor spared they Michael Herican. Old men and young greeted him now with looks askance and cold, instead of the warm welcomes which every hearth had had for him a month before. And every woman in Easky, except the few old crones who grudgingly had wished him well when all was well with him, went by him on the other side, and prayed the saints to deliver their young maidens from such faithless lovers as he.
Intolerable as all this was to him, and unjust as it would have been, even in their sight who did it, could they have known how he had fought against his destiny, it still had its inevitable effect upon him. As there was but one house in Easky where he met a cordial greeting, that house became his continual resort. As there was but one heart into which he could look and find responsive love, he sought his consolation in that heart alone. To Mary Carrol he would gladly have continued to be a friend and brother, but her mother would not suffer him to come inside the doors, and if the broken-hearted maiden could have received his kindnesses, they would have been to her a mockery worse than death. Thus Kathleen Moran's was sometimes the only voice he heard for days, her smile the only smile ever bestowed upon him, and she became, in time, as necessary to his existence as Eve to Adam. They were almost always together. He made longer voyages, and took longer rests; and, when on shore, rarely left the roof under which she dwelt. But he had no definite aim and purpose for which to earn, or to lay up his earnings. He never trusted himself to plan for, or look upon the future.He never yet had dreamed of marrying Kitty Moran. The light had fallen out of his life as effectually as out of Mary Carrol's; and it would have seemed to him as bootless to have heaped together money as it would to her to have finished and arranged her bridal gear.
A year like this told terribly upon him. The indignation of the villagers did not abate with time, and more and more did Michael Herican become an outlaw. It was strange that an event which, in the swift whirl of our metropolitan career, we meet almost every day, should have made such an impression on the minds of sturdy men and women. But it was the first time, in the memory of man, that an Easky lover had proved faithless to an Easky maid, and these rude hearts were as honest in their hate as in their love. He bore it as long as he could, but he was only human; and when the Widow Moran, herself made most uncomfortable by the active hostility of her neighbors, determined to return to Sligo, he was only too willing to go with her. He sold the little cottage where his forefathers had lived and died for many generations, and bade farewell for ever to the home where he had known so many years of happiness, such months of weary suffering.
If Mary Carrol suffered less in conscience and in self-respect than Michael Herican, her suffering made far more fearful havoc with her bodily and mental health. The privations of her childhood had sown the seeds of premature decay; and, at her best and strongest, she was frail and weakly. The shock she had sustained when her life's hopes were shattered had partially unsettled her mind, and physical disease, now slowly developing, sank her into hopeless imbecility. She was not violent or peevish. She never needed any restraint, and, usually, but little care. She would sit all day in the sunlight, listening to the roaring of the sea, her hands folded in her lap, and her great blue eyes gazing out vacantly into the sky. She knew enough to keep herself from danger, and, at long intervals would go alone into the narrow street, and wander up and down, groping her way like a blind person, yet taking no notice of anything that passed around her. It was a sad sight, indeed, for any eyes to see, but, far more so to those who knew her history, and could repeat the story of the cruel wound she bore. There was not among them a heart that did not bleed for her, and scarce a hand that could not have been nerved to vengeance, if the blood of her destroyer could have put away her doom.
The old woman—God knows how old in sorrows!—became more firm and resolute as her daughter grew more helpless. She never wearied in doing all that a mother's heart could prompt, but it was gall and bitterness to her that Mary suffered so uncomplainingly. If she could once have heard her say one hateful word of Michael Herican, it would have satisfied her, but she never did. She learned that Michael had left his home, and had gone with the Morans, and she felt as if she were robbed of her prey. Not that she ever purposed ill to him, but she did wish it, and the scoffs and denunciations of his neighbors seemed to her so many weapons in her hands against him. Alas! for her that this should be the lot of Patrick Carrol's bride.
It might have been a half year since the widow and her victim left Easky, and the midsummer days had come. Mary Carrol had been so long an invalid, and, in her many wanderings, had been so singularly free from harm, that her absence from the cottage caused her mother no surprise or fear. The village children, as they met her rambling in the fields, would sometimes lead her home, and the seaward-going fishermen would often watch her footsteps on the beach with fond solicitude; but they became accustomed to it by and by, and let her have her way.
One cloudless day in July she had strayed out at early dawn while the dew was scarcely dry, and wandered off along the shore, beyond the furthest cottage. The matron of that house, as she went by, sent out her little boy to see that she came to no danger, but in a moment he returned to say that she was sitting on a broken rock out of the water's reach, and so for the time she was forgotten. The day wore on, and Bridget Davanagh grew lonely in her desolate home. A dread of coming evil fell upon her, and, though her cup already so ran over that she could hardly realize the possibility of further misfortune, she could not shake off the new shadow. Restless and uneasy, she started out to seek her child. She hurried past the village eastwardly along the sands. She peered into every crevice of the rocky coast that was large enough to hide a sea-gull's nest, and hunted behind every fallen fragment that might conceal the object of her quest. Slowly, for it was severest toil to her aged feet, she groped over one mile after another, until the lofty cap of Anghris Head rose up before her. She had never been so near it since that fearful day, long years ago, when she came out to see the mangled body of her young husband lying underneath its stormy crags. And now there came over her an impulse to go there once again; again to visit the place where the waves cast him in their murderous wrath; the place whither she event last to meet him when he last came home to her. So she climbed over the huge boulders, one by one, in the declining sunlight, till she stood directly underneath that ragged spire which Anghris lifts aloft above the waves, and there she saw the spot where her beloved had lain in his sad hour of death. There, too, she found her daughter, lying on the same rocky couch where her father lay before her, one arm beneath her head, her face turned up to heaven in the unbreaking slumber of the dead.
This same midsummer's day brought news, from Sligo to Easky, that Michael Herican had married Kitty Moran, and that the widow's heartless schemes had been accomplished.
The house of Bridget Davanagh was now desolate indeed. Her son lost for ever in the unknown waters. Her daughter sleeping in the village churchyard, bearing the burden of her cross no more. There was no cheer for her in the well-meant gossip of her neighbors. There was no comfort for her in the promise of a land, beyond this mortal, of perpetual rest. If her religious instincts and principles were still alive, they remained dumb and dormant. She could not read. She loved not company. Her few personal necessities rendered much bodily toil superfluous, and, when her work was done, she had no other occupation than to sit down and brood over her sorrows. The range of her thought was narrow. She had no future to look forward to. Her eyes were only on the past, and the past held for her but two figures—her murdered Mary and her Mary's murderer. It was in vain that the good parish priest sought to divert her mind and lead her to better things; for, though she said but little and that quietly, he could see, like all who now came intimately near her, that her faculties were clouded and her control over her will and imagination almost totally destroyed.
How long she might have lived thus without becoming fully crazed was, fortunately, never tested. A letter came to her one evening, bearing a foreign post-mark, and dotted over with the many colored stamps which tell of journeys upon sea and land. It was the first letter she had ever received. No relative or friend, no acquaintance except Michael Herican, has she out of Easky, and she was sorely puzzled, as she broke the seal and turned the pages up and down and sideways, in the useless attempt to tell from whence it came. She called in a passing school-child to decipher it, and, as he blundered through its weary lines, she sat with her face buried in her hands, rocking her body ceaselessly to and fro. He reached the end and read the signature of "Bernard Davanagh." The widow's boy still lived. She lifted her worn face out of her hands and the tears chased each other down her cheeks. They eased her throbbing brain, and she bade the child go over it again, for of its first reading she had scarcely heard a word except the name. And now she learned that he was in America. He had been left sick on shore, at the last voyage of his ill-fated vessel, and escaped alive. Since then he had been tossed on every sea which bears a name, till, tired of the toil and danger, he had settled in the far-off mining regions of the western continent. He now sent for her and Mary to come out to him, enclosing money and passage certificates for each, and saying that in two month's time he hoped to have them both with him in his new home. It was a long time before the old woman could comprehend the message; but, when she once really understood that Bernard was alive, she would have started on the instant to reach her boy. Her idea of the distance was, that America lay somewhere out beyond Dromore, as far, perhaps, as that was from Easky, and it was with difficulty that the neighbors, who came flocking in when the news went flitting up and down the street, could control her. Those who stayed with her through the night, and those who went back homeward, had settled it, however, before morning dawned, that, though the journey might be fearful and the chances few, it was better she should go and perish by the way, than stay at home to grieve, and craze, and die.
There was not much preparation. Her cottage sold, her furniture distributed among her friends, the other passage-paper given to a woman in Dromore, who eagerly grasped the chance of going out to seek her husband, and Bridget Davanagh left Easky and its graves for ever. The emigrant best knows the weariness and hardship of a steerage passage in a crowded ship, and this old and worn-out woman endured them as a thousand others, old and feeble, have done since then and before. But the long voyage had an end some time, and, in a day after the ship was moored at New York wharves, the mother had found her son. He had a cabin built and furnished, deep in the wild gorge of a mountain, out of whose sides the glittering anthracite was torn by hundreds of tons a day; and here he took her to live and care for him. Not a face around her that she ever saw before; the dialect of their language so differing from her own that she could only here and there make out a word; Bernard himself grown up into a tall, stout, burly man, black with dust and reeking with soot and oil, she longed almost fiercely for her home by the green sea, and wished herself back again a score of times a day.When her homesickness wore off, as it slowly did, and she formed new acquaintances, and grew familiar with the scenes around her; above all, when she began to realize the comforts which the new world gave beyond the old—she became reconciled to her strange life, and seemed almost herself again. Only when, now and then, her spite and hatred to the name of Herican broke out again did her mind reel with its fury; otherwise, she was more like Bridget Davanagh in her early days of second widowhood than she had been for years.
Meanwhile, of Michael Herican. He had married Kitty Moran, as the Easky story said. It was, on his part, an act of sheer despair. Not that he did not love her. His passion had grown stronger and more absorbing every hour, and she well returned it. But it was no calm conclusion of his judgment that led him to unite his life with hers. It was more like the suicide of a felon who sees his fate before him, but would rather die by his own free act, to-day, than anticipate inevitable death to-morrow. When the Widow Moran "went to her own place," her fortune fell to them. He opened a little store, and, for a while, life, cheered by business, seemed more bearable; but misfortune followed him and, by one loss and another, both his credit and his stock were sacrificed. Honest to the last farthing, he stripped himself of everything to pay his debts, and turned himself and his young wife, to whom privation had ever been a stranger, into the streets—to work, or beg, or starve. Then, for a time, he went to sea; but the lone hours of watchful idleness upon the deep gave him too many opportunities for recollection, and he could not endure it. As a common hireling he worked about the docks, and earned by this chance toil a meagre pittance for the bare necessities of life. But he could not settle permanently to anything. Of good abilities, with strong arms and a willing heart, it was this mental burden only which unmanned him, and this pursued him everywhere and always, like an avenging ghost. Then he began to wander. From Sligo they went to Ballina, and thence to Galway, and thence to Dublin, living awhile in each, but evermore a restless, wavering, aimless man. His poor wife suffered fearfully. Deprived of all the comforts she had ever known, and cut down sometimes to a mere apology for food and clothing, she rued the day when she was born; but she never blamed her husband. Through all, she clung to him faithfully; and when she found herself, at last, in the lowest portion of the capital, and living among those whose touch in other days would have been infection, however else she murmured, it was never against him. They stayed in Dublin for a year and more. A child was born there, but it soon died from exposure and insufficient food, and this made the mother's heart uneasy, and she longed to move. A berth fell in his way on board a homeward-bound Canadian timber-ship, and he agreed to go. He also paid the passage of his wife with labor, and, in due time, their weary feet were standing on the shores of a new world, ready for other journeys and, perhaps, better paths.