Hyacinth. George A. Birmingham
a good convent. A little lower down in the social scale, in the class I come from, the boys are made priests. A doctor is a more expensive article to manufacture, so Maguire’s father selected that line of life for him. Not that they could have made a priest of you, Maguire, in any case. You’d have disgraced Maynooth, as I did.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Hyacinth. ‘I thought a vocation for the life was necessary.’
‘Oh, so it is,’ said Tim Halloran, ‘but, you see, there’s the period of the novitiate. Given a girl at an impressionable age, the proper convent atmosphere, and a prize of six hundred pounds for the Order, and it will go hard with the Reverend Mother if she can’t work the girl up to a vocation. It takes a man a lifetime to make six hundred pounds in a country shop, but there’s many a one who does it by hard work and self-denial; then down come the nuns and sweep it away, and it’s wasted. It ought to be invested in a local factory or in waterworks, or gas-works, or fifty other things that would benefit the town it’s made in. It ought to be fructifying and bearing interest; instead of which off it goes to Munich for stained glass, or to Italy for a marble altar. Is it any wonder Ireland is crying out with poverty?’
‘Yes,’ said Maguire, ‘and that’s not the worst of it. I’d be content to let them take the damned money and deck their churches with it, but the girls—there are hundreds of them caught every year for nuns, and swept out of life. It isn’t the Irish convents alone that get them. American nuns come over and Australian nuns, and they go round and round the country picking up girls here and there, and carry them off. There, I don’t want to talk too much about it. The money is nothing, but the girls and boys——’
‘It seems strange to me,’ said Hyacinth, ‘that when you think that way you should go on belonging to your Church.’
‘Desert the Church!’ said Maguire. ‘We’ll never do that. How could we live without religion? And what other religion is there? I grant you that your priests wouldn’t rob us, but—but think of the cold of it. You can’t realize it, Conneally, but think what it would mean to a Catholic—a religion without saints, without absolution, without sacrifice. Besides, what we complain of is not Catholicism. It’s a parasitic growth destroying the true faith, defiling the Church.’
‘Yes,’ said Tim Halloran, ‘and even from my point of view how should we be the better of a change? Your Church is ruled by old women who think the name of Englishman the most glorious in the world. You preach loyalty, and I believe you pray for the Queen in your services. A nice fool I would feel praying that the Queen should have victory over her enemies.’
For a long time afterwards this conversation dwelt in Hyacinth’s mind. Tim Halloran he knew to be practically a freethinker, but Maguire regularly heard Mass on Sundays, and often went to confession. It was a puzzle how he could do so, feeling as he did about the religious Orders. So insistent did the problem become to his mind that he found himself continually leading the conversation round to it from one side or another. Mary O’Dwyer told him that she also had a sister in a nunnery.
‘She teaches girls to make lace, and wonderful work they do. She is perfectly happy. I think her face is the sweetest and most beautiful thing I have ever seen. There is not a line on it of care or of fretfulness. It seems to me as if her whole life might be described as a quiet smile. I always feel better by the mere recollection of her face for a long time after I have visited her. Oh, I know it wouldn’t do for me. I couldn’t stand it for a week. I should go mad with the quiet restraint of it all. But my sister is happy. I can’t forget that. I suppose she has a vocation.’
‘Vocation,’ said Hyacinth thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I can understand how that would make all the difference. But how many of them have the vocation?’
‘Don’t you think vocation might be learnt? I mean mightn’t one grow into it, if one wished to very much, and if the life was constantly before one’s eyes, beautiful and calm?’
It was almost the same thought which Timothy Halloran had suggested. Mary O’Dwyer spoke of growing into vocation, Tim of the working of it up. Was there any difference except a verbal one?
On another occasion he spoke to Dr. Henry about the position of the Church of Ireland in the country.
‘We have proved,’ said the professor, ‘that the Roman claims have no support in Scripture, history, or reason. Our books remain unanswered, because they are unanswerable. We can do no more.’
‘We might offer the Irish people a Church which they could join,’ said Hyacinth.
‘We do. We offer them the Church of St. Patrick, the ancient, historic Church of Ireland. We offer them the two Sacraments of the Gospel, administered by priests duly ordained at the hands of an Episcopate which goes back in an unbroken line to the Apostles. We present them the three great creeds for their assent. We use a liturgy that is at once ancient and pure. The Church of Ireland has all this, is beyond dispute a branch of the great Catholic Church of Christ.’
‘It may be all you say,’ said Hyacinth, ‘but it is not national. In sentiment and sympathy it is English and not Irish.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Dr. Henry. ‘I think I understand how you feel, but I cannot consent to the conclusion you want to draw. There is no real meaning in the cry for nationality. It is a sentiment, a fashion, and will pass. Even if it were genuine and enduring, I hold it to be better for Ireland to be an integral part of a great Empire than a contemptible and helpless item among the nations of the world, a prey to the intrigues of ambitious foreign statesmen.’
Hyacinth sighed and turned to go, but Dr. Henry laid a hand upon his shoulder and detained him.
‘Conneally,’ he said kindly, ‘let me give you a word of advice. Don’t mix yourself up with your new friends too much. You will ruin your own prospects in life if you do. There is nothing more fatal to a man among the people with whom you and I are to live and work than the suspicion of being tainted with Nationalist ideas. You can’t be both a rebel and a clergyman. You see,’ he added with a smile, ‘I take enough interest in you to know who your friends are, and what you are thinking about.’
CHAPTER V
Augusta Goold’s scheme for enrolling Irish volunteers to help the Boers was duly set forth in the next issue of the Croppy. It included two appeals—one for money and one for men. The details were worked out with the frank contempt for possibility which characterizes some of the famous suggestions of Dean Swift. She had the same faculty that he had for bringing absurdities within the range of the commonplace; but there was this difference between them—Miss Goold quite believed in her own plans, while the great Dean no doubt grinned over the proof-sheets of his ‘Modest Proposal.’
It happened, most unfortunately, that the appeal synchronized with another, also for funds, which was issued by Mr. O’Rourke, the leader of the Parliamentary party. Since the death of John O’Neill the purse of the party had been getting lean. The old tactics which used to draw plaudits and dollars from the United States, as well as a tribute from every parish in Ireland, had lately been unsuccessful. There were still violent scenes in the House of Commons, but they no longer produced anything except contemptuous smiles. Members of Parliament still succeeded occasionally in getting the Chief Secretary to imprison them, but the glory of martyrdom was harder to win than in the old days. Latterly things had come to such a pass that even the reduced stipends offered to the members fell into arrear. The attendance at Westminster dropped away. The Government could afford to smile at Mr. O’Rourke’s efforts to make himself disagreeable, and the Opposition were frankly contemptuous of a people who could not profit them by more than a dozen votes in a critical division. It became impossible to wring even a modest Land Bill from the Prime Minister, and Mr. Chesney, now much at ease in the Secretary’s office in the Castle, scarcely felt it necessary to be civil to deputations which wanted railways. It