CHAPTER XV.

VOILA CE QUI FAIT QUE VOTRE FILLE EST MUETTE.

Madame Swetchine says: “The wrongs which the heart resents most keenly are impalpable and invisible.” We may parody this, and say, with equal truth, that the troubles most difficult to bear are frequently those which, to indifferent observers, seem scarcely worth mention. There is dignity, and a certain stimulating excitement, in great affliction and great wrong; but a petty persecution, which we would fain treat with contempt, but which, in spite of us, pierces with small, envenomed points to our very hearts, is capable of testing our utmost endurance. Who does not know how one malicious, intriguing woman can poison a whole community, break friendship that would have stood the test of death, and destroy a confidence that seemed as firm as the hills? The smiling malice, the affected candor, the smooth insinuation, the more than infantine innocence--happy he who has not learned by bitter experience these tactics of the devil’s sharpshooters!

Of such a nature was the earlier stage of the persecution suffered by the Catholics of Seaton. Servants were daily insulted by mistresses less well-bred than themselves. They had to swallow a gibe with their Friday’s eggs or fish; they were entertained with slanderous stories regarding the priest they loved and reverenced. This was, of course, without provocation. Who ever knew an Irish servant-girl who attacked the religion or irreligion of her employers? Workingmen could not go through the streets to and from their work without being forced to listen to revilings of their church. This was carried to such an extent that they soon found themselves obliged to relinquish their open-air lounging-places, where they had smoked and talked after the day’s work was done, and shut themselves into their houses. Nor were they allowed to remain in peace there. Nearly all the Irish lived on one street, running from the bridge up the west side of the river, and called Irish Lane. When it was found that they would not come out to be insulted, the mob that gathered in the streets every evening marched up this lane, calling out to the Irish, challenging, taunting them. But not one word or act of retaliation could they provoke to give them an excuse for the violence which they were thirsting to commit. Father Rasle had given his people stringent orders to remain in their houses, and make no reply, no matter what was said to them, and to defend themselves only if their houses were broken into. They obeyed him with astonishing docility.

When, later, the people of Seaton found themselves covered with disgrace before the country for their outrages on Catholics, they strove to throw the odium on “a few rowdies,” or on workingmen from other towns employed in the Seaton ship-yards; and in a sketch of the town in the _History of Maine_, written since that time, the Catholics are accused of being themselves the cause of their own troubles. Both these statements are false. In the town-meeting, which endorsed and 159 even suggested every outrage that was committed, ministers and town-officers made inflammatory speeches from the same platform with any ignorant adventurer who might hope to raise himself to notice by reviling the church. Those of the townspeople who were not active members of the mob were, at least, passive lookers-on; and when, at length, acts of violence began, some of the most prominent citizens went to see the windows of the Catholic church and of the priest’s house broken, as they would have gone to any other amusing show. But we anticipate.

The prime instrument in this movement was the Seaton _Herald_, which Carl Yorke had left in a sinking condition. The Know-Nothings, wanting an organ, bought it for a song, and put into the editorial chair a man well fitted for the work. Under such superintendence, the paper rose to an infamous popularity. It was no longer a question of religious freedom, and law, and order, but of common decency. Every week the names of quiet, respectable people were dragged into its columns, that festered with lies--their names only enough veiled to escape the law, but not enough to conceal the identity. In a city, there is some escape from this disgusting notoriety--one can hide from it; but in a small town there is no escape. Everybody is known to everybody, and one lives as in a glass case.

Mr. Yorke looked over one of these papers--“looked holes through it,” Clara said--then threw it into the fireplace, dropped a lighted match on it, and watched its burning with his nostrils compressed, like one who smells a noxious scent. “Don’t send another number of your disgraceful paper to me,” he wrote to the editor; but vainly, for the paper came as before, and was regularly taken in the tongs and put into the kitchen fire, except when Betsey or Patrick slyly rescued it for their own private reading.

“I don’t care for their lies,” Patrick said, when Mr. Yorke reproved him; “but I want to know what they mean to do. If a pack of thieves were planning to break into your house, sir, wouldn’t you stop to listen to their conversation?”

The Catholic children had also their cross to bear. The teachers of the public schools, anxious to have their part in the “great work,” were zealous in enforcing the Bible-reading, and careful to see that no Catholic child omitted the doxology which Martin Luther chose to add to the “Our Father” of the Son of God.

Suddenly an outcry was raised by the Know-Nothings. The pretext they had longed and worked for was given, and great was their joy. The incident was simple enough. The boy who lived with Father Rasle was found by his teacher to have a Douay Bible. He was ordered to take it away and buy a Protestant Bible. “I shall not buy you a Protestant Bible,” Father Rasle said. “Use your own, or go without.” The child was threatened with punishment if he did not bring one. The priest immediately removed him from school, fitted up the building formerly used as a chapel for a school-house, and employed a young Catholic lady, recently come to town, as teacher. The Catholic children gladly left the schools, where they had, perhaps, suffered more than their parents had elsewhere, and placed themselves under the care of Miss Churchill. How beautiful, how strange it was to kneel down and say an Our Father and a Hail Mary at the beginning of their studies! How delightful to go out at recess and play without being assailed by 160 blows or nicknames! How proud they were when Father Rasle came in to give them his weekly instruction in religion! It was quite different from their accustomed ideas of school-life.

Mrs. Yorke was much disturbed by this arrangement. “Edith will have to give up her new friend,” she said decidedly. “I honor Miss Churchill for acting up to her principles, even when it is sure to bring her into a disagreeably conspicuous position; but there is nothing that obliges us to share her danger. When a person comes out of the ranks for conscience’ sake, let her stand alone, and have the glory of it.”

Edith objected at first, but her aunt insisted, and the girl soon saw that, though it went against her feelings, it was right to obey.

“We are not Catholics, my dear,” Mrs. Yorke said; “but it is our duty and wish to protect you from insult. We have suffered in doing so. You know we have given up going to meeting, the sermons were so pointed, and given up the sewing-circle, because we could not go without hearing something offensive, and your cousins find it unpleasant to go into the street even. As to your uncle, his defence of the religious rights of your church exposes him to actual danger. Our life here is nearly intolerable, and this will make it worse if you and Miss Churchill continue to visit each other.”

Fortunately, Miss Churchill anticipated this, and herself put a temporary end to their acquaintance--“till better times,” she wrote.

“She has behaved well,” Mrs. Yorke said, after reading the note. “And now, Charles, I wish that you would show a little prudence, and let events take their course without interfering. Why should you say anything? It does no good.”

“From which motive would you wish me to be silent,” her husband asked quietly--“from cowardice or selfishness?”

She made no reply, save to wring her hands, and wish that she had never come to Seaton.

“Now, Amy dear, listen to reason,” her husband said.

“You know, Charles, it is very disagreeable to have to listen to reason,” she objected pathetically.

He laughed, but persisted. “I have heard you say many a time that disinterested and intelligent men were to blame in withdrawing from public affairs, and leaving them in the hands of dishonest politicians. You said, very sensibly, that, if such men were not strong enough to prevent abuses, they should at least protest against them, and let the world see that patriotism was not quite dead. Perhaps, you added, such a protest might shame others into joining you. Oh! you were eloquent on that subject, little woman, and quoted from _Tara’s Halls_. The idea was that even the indignant breaking of a heart in the cause of truth showed that truth still lived, which was some good. What do you say, milady? Was it all talk? Are you going to fail me? ‘I appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober.’”

Mrs. Yorke was smiling, and her face had caught a slight color. The repetition of her own sentiments had encouraged her, as the recollection of our own heroic aspirations often does help us in weaker moments.

His wife pacified, Mr. Yorke went out to work off his own irritation. He would not have had her know it, but he had been attacked in the street that very day when stopping to speak to Father Rasle. The priest seldom went into the street unless absolutely obliged to, and 161 would gladly have avoided subjecting any one to annoyance on his account; but Mr. Yorke would as soon have denied his faith as have shrunk from stopping to greet the priest cordially--would have so greeted him, indeed, if a hundred guns had been aimed at him for it. But it was not pleasant. He was a fastidious gentleman, accustomed to respect, and the impertinence of the rabble was to him peculiarly offensive. He had come home fuming with anger, which had not abated while restrained. Fortunately, he found something to scold at the minute he went out. A grapevine, which he had coaxed to grow in that unaccustomed country, had this year put forth its first clusters; by some mistake, Patrick had clipped the leaves off, and left the green bunches exposed to the sun.

“Pat, what fool told you to do that?” his master demanded angrily.

“Yourself, sir!” answered Patrick, without flinching. He had his cause of annoyance also.

Mr. Yorke denied the charge with emphasis:

“It is no such thing, you--you vertebrate!”

Patrick drew himself up with an air of dignified resolution. “Sir,” he said, “I’ve done my duty by you, and you’ve done your duty by me, and I’ve taken many a sharp word from you, and made no complaint. But I’m an honest man, if I am not rich nor learned, and I won’t stand and let any one call me such a name as that.”

Mr. Yorke laughed out irrepressibly. “Well, well, Pat,” he said, “I beg your pardon. You’re not a vertebrate.”

“All right, sir!” Pat answered cheerfully, and went about his work satisfied.

Mr. Yorke, his good humor quite restored, went into the house again.

“Poor Pat!” Edith said, a little zealously, when the others smiled over the story.

“We are not scorning him for his ignorance, my dear,” her uncle replied. “With Charles Lamb, ‘I honor an honest obliquity of understanding,’ and I also honor an honest ignorance of books; but sometimes they are amusing.”

“What did I hear you saying to Mr. Yorke, Pat?” Betsey asked the man that evening. “It seemed to me that you were impudent.”

“The fact is, I was really mad,” Patrick owned. “I’d been downtown, and there I came across the editor of the _Herald_, and the sight of him roiled me, especially as he grinned and made believe bless himself. I’d like to meet him alone in a quiet bit of woods. I’d soon change his complexion to as beautiful a black and blue as you ever saw--the dirty spalpeen, with his eye like a buttonhole!”

Betsey sat on the door-step, and looked up at the stars. “If I’d had the placing of ‘em,” she remarked presently, “I’d have put ‘em in even rows, like pins in a paper. It would look better. They’re dreadfully mixed up now.”

Patrick looked into the skies a little while, but his mind was on other things than the marshalling of stars into papers of pins. “I’m sorry Mr. Yorke went to that town-meeting to-night,” he said.

Mr. Yorke was, in fact, at that moment rising in the town-hall to speak. The Rev. John Conway had uttered a bitter tirade against the Catholic clergy, with a fierce recapitulation of the affair of Johnny O’Brian, the priest’s boy, and his Douay Bible. Dr. Martin had followed with cooler, but not less bitter, denunciation, and another 162 reference to Johnny O’Brian. A Portuguese barber had made an idiotic speech, and various town-officers, and prominent Know-Nothings, all more or less illiterate, had spoken, and all had seasoned their discourse with Johnny O’Brian. Finally, the Rev. Saul Griffeth had held his hearers spell-bound while he described, in glowing phrases, the inevitable and complicated ruin of the country in case Catholics should be admitted to equal rights, or any rights at all, and had painted a dazzling picture of the country’s future glories should Catholics be excluded. And here again the perennial Johnny O’Brian figured.

In the midst of a cold and threatening silence, Mr. Yorke got up. Never was his voice more rasping, his mouth more scornful, his glance more full of fire. “It was happy,” he said, “for one man that the Reverend Mr. John Conway was not Calvin; for, instead of being content to burn Servetus, he would first have tortured him, till even the flames would have been a relief. As for the Reverend Mr. Griffeth’s companion pictures of the country’s future, they were daubs such as no sensible man would receive as true representations, and the young man who painted them probably believed in them no more than he had believed in the precisely contrary views which he had expressed within a few years in the speaker’s own hearing. With regard to the other orators, he did not know what that illiterate and idiotic Portuguese barber had to do with the town affairs of Seaton, and he congratulated the rest on the possession of Johnny O’Brian, who had certainly been a godsend to them. So long as a shred of that devoted child was left, they would have something to say. But the reasoning in the most of the speeches to which he had listened had reminded him of the Latin of Sgarnarelle, _le médecin malgré lui_. They had put their premises in the middle ages of Europe, and their conclusion in a little New England town of the nineteenth century. ‘_Voilà ce qui fait que votre fille est muette._’ What, in fact, are we here to talk about?” He then went on to state his own views.

It is said of the French legitimists under the first empire, that in their scorn of the emperor, and their determination to regard him as a foreigner, they used to pronounce his name so that it seemed to be a word of twenty syllables. Mr. Yorke had that faculty. His enunciation was clear, and the letter _r_ very prominent, and the mere pronouncing of a name he could make an insult. At first his manner had commanded silence--no one liked to be the first to hiss; but it became too scathing presently, and when one gave the first faint sound of disapproval, the storm broke out. He tried again and again to speak, but they would not hear him. Shouts and jeers arose, and cries of “Put him out! Down with him!”

“Touch me if you dare!” he said, facing them, and lifting his cane. They stood aside, and he walked out, and went home, not very well pleased.