And during that long night, as Herbert and his sisters
sat up cowering round the fire, he told them of all
that had been said at Hap House. “And can
it not be as he says?” Mary had asked.
“And that Herbert should give up his wife!”
said Emmeline.
“No; but the other thing.”
“Do not dream of it,” said Herbert.
“It is all, all impossible. The house that
we are now in belongs to Sir Owen Fitzgerald.”
THE FIRST MONTH
And now I will beg my readers to suppose a month to
have passed by since Sir Thomas Fitzgerald died.
It was a busy month in Ireland. It may probably
be said that so large a sum of money had never been
circulated in the country in any one month since money
had been known there; and yet it may also be said
that so frightful a mortality had never occurred there
from the want of that which money brings.
It was well understood by all men now that the customary
food of the country had disappeared. There was
no longer any difference of opinion between rich and
poor, between Protestant and Roman Catholic; as to
that, no man dared now to say that the poor, if left
to themselves, could feed themselves, or to allege
that the sufferings of the country arose from the
machinations of money-making speculators. The
famine was an established fact, and all men knew that
it was God’s doing,—all men knew this,
though few could recognize as yet with how much mercy
God’s hand was stretched out over the country.
Or may it not perhaps be truer to say that in such
matters there is no such thing as mercy—no
special mercies—no other mercy than that
fatherly, forbearing, all-seeing, perfect goodness
by which the Creator is ever adapting this world to
the wants of His creatures, and rectifying the evils
arising from their faults and follies? Sed quo
Musa tendis? Such discourses of the gods as these
are not to be fitly handled in such small measures.
At any rate, there was the famine, undoubted now by
any one; and death, who in visiting Castle Richmond
may be said to have knocked at the towers of a king,
was busy enough also among the cabins of the poor.
And now the great fault of those who were the most
affected was becoming one which would not have been
at first sight expected. One would think that
starving men would become violent, taking food by
open theft—feeling, and perhaps not without
some truth, that the agony of their want robbed such
robberies of its sin. But such was by no means
the case. I only remember one instance in which
the bakers’ shops were attacked; and in that
instance the work was done by those who were undergoing
no real suffering. At Clonmel, in Tipperary,
the bread was one morning stripped away from the bakers’
shops; but at that time, and in that place, there was
nothing approaching to famine. The fault of the
people was apathy. It was the feeling of the
multitude that the world and all that was good in
it was passing away from them; that exertion was useless,
and hope hopeless. “Ah, me! your honour,”
said a man to me, “there’ll never be a
bit and a sup again in the county Cork! The life
of the world is fairly gone!”
