The Yellow Briar. Patrick Slater
Trueman’s cows were breachy by nature; and for years they were headstrong in the notion that a cow-path should be made across the field in front of Osgoode Hall. The heavy and formidable iron fence along Queen Street stands to this day in front of the law courts as a memorial to John Trueman’s cows. The law, they say, is tender in its treatment of established customs and ancient ways. For generations, the Bench and Bar of Ontario have continued to sidle and dodge themselves into the precincts of Osgoode Hall through curious stock-yard openings that were specially designed in Europe to keep out Trueman’s cows. Some monument to a woman’s milk-pail! And, by the way, the young lady from Baltimore got her blue-grey eyes as an heirloom from Sarah Trueman of the Tavern Tyrone.
On my rare visits to Toronto, years back, one of my pleasures was to take my stand a little before dinner-time at the head of York Street, and watch Her Majesty’s justices negotiate those barricaded openings in their haste to start a heavy day’s work. But, latterly, I haven’t been in Toronto much. The last judge I saw doing the trick was His Lordship, the late Chief Justice, Sir Glenholme Falconbridge. The ageing judge was toting a green bag and getting through seemed quite an effort. What a master Falconbridge was of the English tongue, and how sparingly he used it! He liked to catch speckled trout up our way, also — if his companion rowed the boat. But if he left it to others to write the long judgments, he did into English an exquisite lyric:
Come, Lesbia, while we may;
Let’s live and love our lives away:
And care not what the old folk say.
The sun that sets will rise again as bright:
There is no rising for our little light;
It sets in never ending night.
Count me a thousand kisses o’er.
Count me a thousand kisses more,
And then, we’ll count them o’er and o’er again!
CATULLUSV
If getting along agreeably with young Trueman was sometimes a problem for me, young Jack often had occasion to scratch his head over problems of his own. His father was a stern, arbitrary man of harsh temper, and sorely set on ruling his son. Many a good beating he gave the boy. One morning I was viewing one of these affairs from the corner of the alley. Jack was hollering blue murder.
His mother Sarah, a quiet, kindly woman, and a simple soul after all, stepped out into the yard to do something about it.
“Are you aware, sir,” she remonstrated, “that you are beating the boy unmercifully?”
“Aye, madame!” said Himself between the welts, “I am trying hard to do that same.”
The mother’s pent-up feelings hurried her away quickly through the kitchen door. Jack’s collie was also objecting; but he stood his ground, and showed his teeth. After a moment, his feelings got the better of him. He went right in and took a biting hold on the man’s calf. The dog meant business, and the North of Ireland let out a grand howl. The three of us scuttled down the alley.
On the morning of the twenty-fourth of May, the guns at the fort spoke; and the 81st Regiment of Foot paraded in honour of the young Queen. It was a gala day for the local gentry. Upper Canada had the spirit and turn of mind of a small Crown colony. It had been founded by families who suffered on the king’s side in the old colonies. It had justified its very existence as a protest against American ways and methods. It had grown slowly, leaning heavily on England for spiritual and economic support. But free trade in England had recently knocked the prop from under the Canadian flour-barrel. There was the smell, moreover, of radical political changes in the local air. And now people of no account were flocking into the country, more concerned with making a living than with supporting the established order. How necessary that a strong demonstration of loyalty be given!
And the old order extended itself. That evening, the people around York Street got full and felt happy; and the gentry drove their ladies in open carriages to a fancy-dress ball. Of a sudden it rained cats and dogs. There were many yards of material in a lady’s costume in those spacious days; and when one considers the undies they wore, it is a problem how the young creatures got their things dried out that night to dance the light fantastic.
The festival of St. John the Baptist arrived. Young Jack confided to me there would be great goings-on at the Trueman place that night. Himself and Mr. William Cassidy — him that kept the gaol — were forming a secret society; and the first meeting would be held in the front room upstairs. Some Mr. Grand Lodge in Dublin had written letting them do it. I was impressed with the awful and horrible nature of this business. They would have John McLaughlin at the door to keep anyone from spying on them. They wrote their names in blood, so Jack told me. They drank each other’s blood. It was enough to make a fellow’s hair stand on end.
If ever a thorough job of house-cleaning was done, the Trueman women did it that day. I went around in the evening to look the situation over. The street door of the tap-room was closed. There were Scots and other strangers about the place, all in their Sunday clothes and wearing little pinnies. Everyone of them looked as handsome as the knave of hearts.
Yes, something seemed to be going on in the front room over the bar.
I sneaked upstairs to have a look, but Mrs. Trueman saw me. She said I had better be slipping away home.
I asked Mr. Michael O’Hogan, our landlord, about the affair. He had a drop of drink taken.
“Arrah, my boy!” he exclaimed. “Beware of them cursed Masons.”
He shifted his seat on the bench with the slow, clumsy, angular motions of an Irishman whose feelings are aroused.
“Whist lad! they’re a crew of black-hearted, murthering scoundrels.”
Three or four cronies were with him; and, in their secretive-like way, they had been calavering together. Your Celt makes a secret even of his old clay dolley. It is hidden in the hand and smoked furtively from the side of the mouth. He smokes as if nursing a sore left jaw. We Irish are not very trustful; and sometimes that fact makes us not very trustworthy.
There were slow, knowing, Celtic nods in the room as face solemnly answered to face.
“Purgatory is not for the likes of them,” declared Mr. O’Hogan, marking the mournful occasion by filling his pipe with borrowed tobacco.
“St. Peter — God bless him — claps every Mason into hell to be boiled in oil.”
A long silence set in.
“Aye, the devil keeps a hot flail hanging on the corner-beam of hell for the likes of them.”
Mrs. O’Hogan planted herself in the doorway. She wore a dirty short skirt, and her arms were akimbo.
One of the men present observed her condition.
“It is swelled up you are, Bridget,” he told her, as he twisted his neck and spat on the floor. “It is buttermilk you have been drinking.”
“It be,” said Mrs. O’Hogan.
“If it be a boy,” observed Mr. O’Hogan, “Holy Jasus be praised!”
Around the corner from their lodge meeting, the Masons got a thorough going over that night. The liquor Mr. O’Hogan and his friends had drunk ran hot in their veins, and their emotions were on fire. The murder of poor William Morgan was canvassed in all its gruesome details.
“I mind well the said William Morgan,” declared Mr.O’Hogan, after the story had been talked out. “He worked at John Doel’s brewer, not a block away from where you are sitting.”
It was a creepy tale of plotted murder they told. Of course, I do not remember the details as given that evening. But I know the story well enough. How could it be otherwise? For fifty years, the fate of William Morgan was discussed, on and off and pro and con, before every fireside in Upper Canada.
Morgan, it appeared, claimed to be a Free Mason from Canada, and a lodge at Rochester was careless and let him in. He proposed to get out a book divulging