In the year 1850 or thereabouts religious and charitable society in
England was seized with a desire to convert Irish Roman Catholics to
the Protestant faith. It is clear to everyone with any experience of
missionary societies that, the more remote the field of actual work, the
easier it is to keep alive the interest of subscribers. The mission to
Roman Catholics, therefore, commenced in that western portion of Galway
which the modern tourist knows as Connemara, and the enthusiasm was
immense. Elderly ladies, often with titles, were energetic in the cause
of the new reformation. Young ladies, some of them very attractive,
collected money from their brothers and admirers. States-men and Bishops
headed the subscription-lists, and influential committees earnestly
debated plans for spending the money which poured in. Faith in the
efficacy of money handled by influential committees is one of the
characteristics of the English people, and in this particular case
it seemed as if their faith were to be justified by results. Most
encouraging reports were sent to headquarters from Connemara. It
appeared that converts were flocking in, and that the schools of the
missionaries were filled to overflowing. In the matter of education
circumstances favoured the new reformation. The leonine John McHale, the
Papal Archbishop of Tuam, pursued a policy which drove the children of
his flock into the mission schools. The only other kind of education
available was that which some humorous English statesman had called
‘national,’ and it did not seem to the Archbishop desirable that an
Irish boy should be beaten for speaking his own language, or rewarded
for calling himself ‘a happy English child.’ He refused to allow the
building of national schools in his diocese, and thus left the cleverer
boys to drift into the mission schools, where they learnt carefully
selected texts of Scripture along with the multiplication-table. The
best of them were pushed on through Dublin University, and crowned the
hopes of their teachers by taking Holy Orders in the Church of England.
There are still to be met with in Galway and Mayo ancient peasants and
broken-down inhabitants of workhouses who speak with a certain pride
of ‘my brother the minister.’ There are also here and there in English
rectories elderly gentlemen who have almost forgotten the thatched
cottages where they ate their earliest potatoes.
Among these cleverer boys was one Æneas Conneally, who was something
more than clever. He was also religious in an intense and enthusiastic
manner, which puzzled his teachers while it pleased them. His ancestors
had lived for generations on a seaboard farm, watered by salt rain,
swept by misty storms. The famine and the fever that followed it left
him fatherless and brotherless. The emigration schemes robbed him and
his mother of their surviving relations. The mission school and the
missionary’s charity effected the half conversion of the mother and a
whole-hearted acceptance of the new faith on the part of Æneas. Unlike
most of his fellows in the college classrooms, he refused to regard an
English curacy as the goal of his ambition. It seemed to him that his
conversion ought not to end in his parading the streets of Liverpool in
a black coat and a white tie. He wanted to return to his people and tell
them in their own tongue the Gospel which he had found so beautiful.
The London committee meditated on his request, and before they arrived
at a conclusion his mother died, having at the last moment made a
tardy submission to the Church she had denied. Her apostasy--so the
missionaries called it--confirmed the resolution of her son, and the
committee at length agreed to allow him to return to his native village
as the first Rector of the newly-created parish of Carrowkeel. He was
provided with all that seemed necessary to insure the success of
his work. They built him a gray house, low and strong, for it had to
withstand the gales which swept in from the Atlantic. They bought him
a field where a cow could graze, and an acre of bog to cut turf from. A
church was built for him, gray and strong, like his house. It was fitted
with comfortable pews, a pulpit, a reading-desk, and a movable table of
wood decently covered with a crimson cloth. Beyond the church stood the
school he had attended as a boy, whitewashed without and draped inside
with maps and illuminated texts. A salary, not princely but sufficient,
was voted to Mr. Conneally, and he was given authority over a
Scripture-reader and a schoolmaster. The whole group of mission
buildings--the rectory, the church, and the school--stood, like types
of the uncompromising spirit of Protestantism, upon the bare hillside,
swept by every storm, battered by the Atlantic spray. Below them
Carrowkeel, the village, cowered in such shelter as the sandhills
afforded. Eastward lonely cottages, faintly smoking dots in the
landscape, straggled away to the rugged bases of the mountains. The
Rev. Æneas Conneally entered upon his mission enthusiastically, and
the London committee awaited results. There were scarcely any results,
certainly none that could be considered satisfactory. The day for making
conversions was past, and the tide had set decisively against the new
reformation. A national school, started by a clearsighted priest, in
spite of his Archbishop, left the mission school almost without pupils.
The Scripture-reader lost heart, and took to seeking encouragement
in the public-house. He found it, and once when exalted--he said,
spiritually--paraded the streets cursing the Virgin Mary. Worse
followed, and the committee in London dismissed the man. A diminishing
income forced on them the necessity of economy, and no successor was
appointed. For a few years Mr. Conneally laboured on. Then a sharp-eyed
inspector from London discovered that the schoolmaster took very little
trouble about teaching, but displayed great talent in prompting his
children at examinations. He, too, was dismissed, and the committee,
still bent on economy, appointed a mistress in his place. She was a
pretty girl, and after she had shivered through the stormy nights of
two winters in the lonely school-house, Mr. Conneally married her.
Afterwards the office of school-teacher was also left vacant. The
whitewashed school fell gradually into decay, and the committee effected
a further saving.
After his marriage Mr. Conneally’s missionary enthusiasm began to flag.
His contact with womanhood humanized him. The sternness of the reformer
died in him, and his neighbours, who never could comprehend his
religion, came to understand the man. They learned to look upon him as a
friend, to seek his sympathy and help. In time they learnt to love him.
Two years passed, and a son was born. The village people crowded upon
him with congratulations, and mothers of wide experience praised the boy
till Mrs. Conneally’s heart swelled in her with pride. He was christened
Hyacinth, after a great pioneer and leader of the mission work. The
naming was Mr. Conneally’s act of contrition for the forsaking of
his enthusiasm, his recognition of the value of a zeal which had not
flagged. Failing the attainment of greatness, the next best thing is to
dedicate a new life to a patron saint who has won the reward of those
who endure to the end. For two years more life in the glebe house was
rapturously happy. Such bliss has in it, no doubt, an element of sin,
and it is not good that it should endure. This was to be seen afterwards
in calmer times, though hardly at the moment when the break came. There
was a hope of a second child, a delightful time of expectation; then an
accident, the blighting of the hope, and in a few days the death of Mrs.
Conneally. Her husband buried her, digging the first grave in the rocky
ground that lay around the little church.
For a time Mr. Conneally was stunned by his sorrow. He stopped working
altogether, ceased to think, even to feel. Men avoided him with
instinctive reverence at first, and afterwards with fear, as he
wandered, muttering to himself, among the sandhills and along the beach.
After a while the power of thought and a sense of the outward things of
life returned to him. He found that an aged crone from the village had
established herself in his house, and was caring for Hyacinth. He let
her stay, and according to her abilities she cooked and washed for him
and the boy, neither asking wages nor taking orders from him, until she
died.
Hyacinth grew and throve amazingly. From morning till evening he was in
the village, among the boats beside the little pier, or in the fields,
when the men worked there. Everyone petted and loved him, from Father
Moran, the priest who had started the national school, down to old
Shamus, the crippled singer of interminable Irish songs and teller of
heroic legends of the past. It was when he heard the boy repeat a story
of Finn MacCool to the old crone in the kitchen that Mr. Conneally awoke
to the idea that he must educate his son. He began, naturally enough,
with Irish, for it was Irish, and not English, that Hyacinth spoke
fluently.
Afterwards the English alphabet followed, though not for the sake of
reading books, for except the Bible and the Prayer-Book Hyacinth was
taught to read no English books. He learned Latin after a fashion, not
with nice attention to complexities of syntax, but as a language meant
to be used, read, and even spoken now and then to Father Moran.
Meanwhile the passage of the years brought changes to Carrowkeel.
The Admiralty established a coastguard station near the village, and
arranged, for the greater security of the Empire, that men in blue-serge
clothes should take it in turns to look at the Atlantic through a
telescope. Then the unquiet spirit of the Congested Districts Board
possessed the place for a while. A young engineer designed a new pier to
shelter fishing-boats. He galvanized the people into unwonted activity,
and, though sceptical of good results, they earned a weekly wage by
building it. Boats came, great able boats, which fought the Atlantic,
and the old curraghs were left to blister in the sun far up on the
beach. Instructors from the Isle of Man taught new ways of catching
mackerel. Green patches between the cottages and the sea, once the
playground of pigs and children, or the marine parade of solemn lines
of geese, were spread with brown nets. On May mornings, if the take was
good, long lines of carts rattled down the road carrying the fish to
the railway at Clifden, and the place bore for a while the appearance
of vitality. A vagrant Englishman discovered that lobsters could be had
almost for the asking in Carrowkeel. The commercial instincts of his
race were aroused in him.
He established a trade between the villagers and the fishmongers of
Manchester. The price of lobsters rose to the unprecedented figure of
four shillings a dozen, and it was supposed that even so the promoter of
the scheme secured a profit.
To Æneas Conneally, growing quietly old, the changes meant very little.
The coastguards, being bound by one of the articles of the British
Constitution, came to church on Sunday mornings with exemplary
regularity, and each man at fixed intervals brought a baby to be
christened and a woman to be churched. Otherwise they hardly affected
Mr. Conneally’s life. The great officials who visited Carrowkeel to
survey the benignant activities of the Congested Districts Board
were men whose magnificent intellectual powers raised them above any
recognised form of Christianity. Neither Father Moran’s ministrations
nor Mr. Conneally’s appealed to them.
The London committee of the mission to Roman Catholics made no inquiry
about what was going on at Carrowkeel. They asked for no statistics,
expected no results, but signed quarterly cheques for Mr. Conneally,
presuming, one may suppose, that if he had ceased to exist they would
somehow have heard of it.
By far the most important event for Hyacinth and his father was the
death of their old housekeeper. In the changed state of society in
Carrowkeel it was found impossible to secure the services of another.
Hyacinth, at this time about fifteen years old, took to the housework
without feeling that he was doing anything strange or unmanly. He was
familiar with the position of ‘bachelor boys’ who, having grown elderly
under the care of a mother, preferred afterwards the toil of their own
kitchens to the uncertain issue of marrying a girl to ‘do for them.’
Life under their altered circumstances was simplified. It seemed
unnecessary to carry a meal from the room it was cooked in to another
for the purpose of eating it, so the front rooms of the house, with
their tattered furniture, were left to moulder quietly in the persistent
damp. One door was felt to be sufficient for the ingress and egress
of two people from a house. The kitchen door, being at the back of the
house, was oftenest the sheltered one, so the front door was bolted, and
the grass grew up to it. One by one, as Hyacinth’s education required,
the Latin and Greek books were removed from the forsaken study, and
took their places among the diminishing array of plates and cups on the
kitchen dresser. The spreading and removal of a tablecloth for every
meal came to be regarded as foolish toil. When room was required on the
table for plates, the books and papers were swept on one side. A pile of
potatoes, and the pan, with bacon or a fish perhaps still frizzling in
it, was set in the place left vacant.
Morning and evening Æneas Conneally expected his son to join with him in
prayer. The two knelt together on the earthen floor facing the window,
while the old man meditated aloud on Divine things. There were breaks in
his speech and long silences, so that sometimes it was hard to tell
when his prayer had really ended. These devotions formed a part of
his father’s life into which Hyacinth never really entered at all. He
neither rebelled nor mocked. He simply remained outside. So when his
father wandered off to solitary places on the seashore, and sat gazing
into the sunset or a gathering storm, Hyacinth neither followed nor
questioned him. Sometimes on winter nights when the wind howled more
fiercely than usual round the house, the old man would close the book
they read together, and repeat aloud long passages from the Apocalypse.
His voice, weak and wavering at first, would gather strength as he
proceeded, and the young man listened, stirred to vague emotion over the
fall of Babylon the Great.
For the most part Hyacinth’s time was his own. Even the hours of study
were uncertain. He read when he liked, and his father seemed content
with long days of idleness followed by others of application. It was,
indeed, only owing to his love of what he read that the boy learned at
all. Often while he tramped from his home to the village at midday his
heart was hot within him with some great thought which had sprung to him
from a hastily construed chorus of Euripides. Sometimes he startled the
fishermen when he went with them at night by chanting Homer’s rolling
hexameters through the darkness while the boat lay waiting, borne
gunwale down to the black water with the drag of the net that had been
shot.
There was a tacit understanding that Hyacinth, like his father, was
to take Holy Orders. He matriculated in Trinity College when he was
eighteen, and, as is often done by poorer students, remained at home,
merely passing the required examinations, until he took his degree,
and the time came for his entering the divinity school. Then it became
necessary for him to reside in Dublin, and the first great change in his
life took place.
The night before he left home he and his father sat together in the
kitchen after they had finished their evening meal. For a long time
neither of them spoke. Hyacinth held a book in his hand, but scarcely
attempted to read it. His thoughts wandered from hopeful expectation of
what the future was to bring him and the new life was to mean, to vague
regrets, weighted with misgivings, which would take no certain shape.
There crowded upon him recollections of busy autumn days when the grain
harvest overtook the belated hay-making, and men toiled till late in
the fields; of long nights in the springtime when he tugged at the
fishing-nets, and felt the mackerel slipping and flapping past his
feet in the darkness; of the longer winter nights when he joined the
gatherings of the boys and girls to dance jigs and reels on the earthen
floor of some kitchen. It seemed now that all this was past and over for
him. Holiday time would bring him back to Carrowkeel, but would it be
the same? Would he be the same?
He looked at his father, half hoping for sympathy; but the old man sat
gazing--it seemed to Hyacinth stupidly--into the fire. He wondered if
his father had forgotten that this was their last evening together. Then
suddenly, without raising his eyes, the old man began to speak, and it
appeared that he, too, was thinking of the change.
‘I do not know, my son, what they will teach you in their school of
divinity. I have long ago forgotten all I learned there, and I have not
missed the knowledge. It does not seem to me now that what they taught
me has been of any help in getting to know Him.’
He paused for a long time. Hyacinth was familiar enough with his
father’s ways of speech to know that the emphatic ‘Him’ meant the God
whom he worshipped.
‘There is, I am sure, only one way in which we can become His friends.
_These are they which have come out of great tribulation!_ You remember
that, Hyacinth? That is the only way. You may be taught truths about
Him, but they matter very little. You have already great thoughts,
burning thoughts, but they will not of themselves bring you to Him. The
other way is the only way. Shall I wish it for you, my son? Shall I give
it to you for my blessing? May great tribulation come upon you in your
life! _Great tribulation!_ See how weak my faith is even now at the very
end. I cannot give you this blessing, although I know very well that it
is the only way. I know this, because I have been along this way myself,
and it has led me to Him.’
Again he paused. It did not seem to Hyacinth to be possible to say
anything. He was not sure in his heart that the friendship of the Man of
Sorrows was so well worth having that he would be content to pay for it
by accepting such a benediction from his father.
‘I shall do this for you, Hyacinth: I shall pray that when the choice is
given you, the great choice between what is easy and what is hard, the
right decision may be made for you. I do not know in what form it will
come. Perhaps it will be as it was with me. He made the choice for me,
for indeed I could not have chosen for myself. He set my feet upon the
narrow way, forced me along it for a while, and now at the end I see His
face.’
Hyacinth had heard enough of the brief bliss of his father’s married
life to understand. He caught for the first time a glimpse of the
meaning of the solitary life, the long prayers, and the meditations. He
was profoundly moved, but it did not even then seem to him desirable to
choose such a way, or to have such attainment thrust on him.
Next morning the autumn sunlight chased the recollection of his emotion
from his mind. The fishermen stopped his car as he drove through the
street to shake hands with him. Their wives shouted familiar blessings
from the cabin doors. Father Moran came bare-headed to the gate of his
presbytery garden and waved a farewell.