MR. ROBERT MORRIS.
One morning, a little later in the summer, about the beginning of
August, all Galway were terrified by the tidings of another murder.
Mr. Morris had been killed,--had been "dropped," as the language of
the country now went, from behind a wall built by the roadside. It
had been done at about five in the afternoon, in full daylight; and,
as was surmised by the police, with the consciousness of many of the
peasantry around. He had been walking along the road from Cong to his
own house, and had been "dropped," and left for dead by the roadside.
Dead, indeed, he was when found. Not a word more would have been said
about it, but for the intervention of the police, who were on the
spot within three hours of the occurrence. A little girl had been
coming into Cong, and had told the news. The little girl was living
at Cong, and was supposed to be in no way connected with the murder.
"It's some of them boys this side of Clonbur," said one of the men of
Cong.
No one thought it necessary after that to give any further
explanation of the circumstances.
Mr. Robert Morris was somewhat of an oddity in his way; but he was
a man who only a few months since was most unlikely to have fallen
a victim to popular anger. He was about forty years of age, and
had lived altogether at Minas Cottage, five or six miles from Cong,
as you pass up the head of Lough Corrib, on the road to Maum. He
was unmarried, and lived quite alone in a small house, trusting to
the attentions of two old domestics and their daughter. He kept a
horse and a car and a couple of cows and a few cocks and hens; but
otherwise he lived alone. He was a man of property, and had, indeed,
come from a family very long established in the county. People said
of him that he had L500 a year; but he would have been very glad
to have seen the half of it paid to his agent; for Mr. Morris, of
Minas Cottage, had his agent as well as any other gentleman. He was
a magistrate for the two counties, Galway and Mayo, and attended
sessions both at Cong and at Clonbur. But when there he did little
but agree with some more active magistrate; and what else he did with
himself no one could tell of him.
But it was said in respect to him that he was a benevolent gentleman;
and but a year or two since very many in the neighbourhood would have
declared him to be especially the poor man's friend. With L500 a year
he could have done much; with half that income he could do something
to assist them, and something he still did. He had his foibles, and
fancies, but such as they were they did not tread on the corns of any
of his poorer neighbours. He was proud of his birth, proud of his
family, proud of having owned, either in his own hands or those of
his forefathers, the same few acres,--and many more also, for his
forefathers before him had terribly diminished the property. There
was a story that his great great grandfather had lived in a palatial
residence in County Kilkenny. All this he would tell freely, and
would remark that to such an extent had the family been reduced by
the extravagance of his forefathers. "But the name and the blood
they can never touch," he would remark. They would not ask as to his
successor, because they valued him too highly, and because Mr. Morris
would never have admitted that the time had come when it was too late
to bring a bride home to the western halls of his forefathers. But
the rumour went that Minas Cottage would go in the female line to a
second cousin, who had married a cloth merchant in Galway city, to
whom nor to her husband did Mr. Morris ever speak. There might be
something absurd in this, but there was nothing injurious to his
neighbours, and nothing that would be likely to displease the poorer
of them.
But Mr. Morris had been made the subject of various requests from his
tenants. They had long since wanted and had received a considerable
abatement in their rent. Hence had come the straitened limits of L250
a year. They had then offered the "Griffith's valuation." To explain
the "Griffith's valuation" a chapter must be written, and as no
one would read the explanation if given here it shall be withheld.
Indeed, the whole circumstances of Mr. Morris's property were too
intricate to require, or to admit, elucidation here. He was so driven
that if he were to keep anything for himself he must do so by means
of the sheriff's officer, and hence it had come to pass that he had
been shot down like a mad dog by the roadside.
County Galway was tolerably well used to murders by this time, but
yet seemed to be specially astonished by the assassination of Mr.
Morris. The innocence of the man; for the dealings of the sheriff's
officer were hardly known beyond the town land which was concerned!
And then the taciturnity of the county side when the murder had been
effected! It was not such a deed as was the slaughtering of poor
Florian Jones, or the killing of Terry Carroll in the court house.
They had been more startling, more alarming, more awful for the
tradesmen, and such like, to talk of among themselves, but the
feeling of mystery there had been connected with the secret capacity
of one individual. Everyone, in fact, knew that those murders had
been done by Lax. And all felt that for the doing of murders Lax was
irrepressible. But over there in the neighbourhood of Clonbur, or in
the village of Cong, Lax had never appeared. There was no one in the
place to whom the police could attribute any Lax-like properties. In
that respect, the slaughtering of Mr. Morris had something in it more
terrible even than those other murders. It seemed as though murder
were becoming the ordinary popular mode by which the people should
redress themselves,--as though the idea of murder had recommended
itself easily to their intellects. And then they had quietly
submitted--all of them--to taciturnity. They who were not concerned
in the special case, the adjustment that is of Mr. Morris's rent,
accepted his murder with perfect quiescence, as did those who were
aggrieved. Nobody had seen anything. Nobody had heard anything.
Nobody had known anything. Such were the only replies that were given
to the police. If Mr. Morris, then why not another--and another--till
the whole country would be depopulated? In Mr. Morris's case a
landlord had been chosen; but in other localities agents and
sheriffs' officers,--and even those keepers on a property which a
gentleman is supposed to employ,--were falling to the right and to
the left. But of Mr. Morris and his death nothing was heard.
Yorke Clayton of course went down there, for this, too, was in his
district, and Hunter went with him, anxious, if possible, to learn
something. They saw every tenant on the property; and, indeed, they
were not over numerous. There was not one as to whom they could
obtain evidence that he was ever ferocious by character. "They've got
to think that they have the right to it all. The poor creatures are
not so bad as them that is teaching them. If I think as the farm is
my own, of course I don't like to be made to pay rent for it." That
was the explanation of the circumstances, as given by Mrs. Davies,
of the hotel at Clonbur. And it was evident that she thought it to
be sufficient. The meaning of it, according to Captain Clayton's
reading, was this: "If you allow such doctrines to be preached abroad
by Members of Parliament and Landleague leaders,--to be preached as
a doctrine fit for the people,--then you cannot be surprised if the
people do as they are taught and hold their tongues afterwards."
This Mr. Morris had been the first cousin of our poor old friend
Black Tom Daly.
"Good God!" he exclaimed, as soon as he read the news, sitting in his
parlour at Daly's Bridge; "there is Bob Morris gone now."
"Bob Morris, of Minas Cottage!" exclaimed Peter Bodkin, who had
ridden over to give Tom Daly some comfort in his solitude, if it
might be possible.
"By George! yes; Bob Morris! Did you know him?"
"I don't think he ever came out hunting."
"Hunting, indeed! How should he, when he hadn't a horse that he could
ride upon? And Bob knew nothing of sport. The better for him, seeing
the way that things are going now. No, he never was out hunting, poor
fellow. But for downright innocence and kindness and gentleness of
heart, there is no one left like him. And now they have murdered him!
What is to be the end of it? There is Persse telling me to hold on by
the hounds, when I couldn't keep a hound in the kennels at Ahaseragh
if it were ever so."
"Times will mend," said Peter.
"And Raheney Gorse fired so as to drive every fox out of the country!
Persse is wrong, and I am wrong to stay at his bidding. The very
nature of mankind has altered in the old country. There are not the
same hearts within their bosoms. To burn a gorse over a fox's head!
There is a damnable cruelty in it of which men were not guilty,--by
G----! they were not capable,--a year or two ago. These ruffians
from America have come and told them that they shall pay no rent,
and their minds have been so filled with the picture that its
magnificence has overcome them. They used to tell us that money is
the root of all evil; it proves to be true now. The idea that they
should pay no rent has been too much for them; and they have become
fiends under the feelings which have been roused. Only last year they
were mourning over a poor fox like a Christian,--a poor fox that had
been caught in a trap,--and now they would not leave a fox in the
country, because the gentlemen, they think, are fond of them. The
gentlemen are their enemies, and therefore they will spite them. They
will drive every gentleman out of the country, and where will they be
then?" Here Tom Daly sat quiet for a while, looking silent through
the open window, while Peter sat by him feeling the occasion to be
too solemn for speech. After a while Tom continued his ejaculations.
"Gladstone! Gladstone! There are those who think that man to be great
and good; but how can he be great and good if he lets loose such
spirits among us? They tell me that he's a very amiable man in his
own family, and goes to church regular; but he must be the most
ignorant human being that ever took upon himself to make laws for
a people. He can understand nothing about money, nothing about
property, nothing about rents! I suppose he thinks it fair to take
away one man's means and give them to another, simply because one is
a gentleman and the other not! A fair rent! There's nothing I hate so
much in my very soul as the idea of a fair rent. A fair rent means
half that a man pays now; but in a few years' time it will mean again
whatever the new landlord may choose to ask. And fixity of tenure!
Every man is to get what doesn't belong to him, and if a man has
anything he's to be turned out; that is fixity of tenure. And freedom
of sale! A man is to be allowed to sell what isn't his own. He thinks
that when he has thrown half an eye over a country he can improve it
by altering all the wisdom of ages. A man talks and talks, and others
listen to him till they flatter him that another God Almighty has
been sent upon earth." It was thus that Tom Daly expressed himself as
to the Prime Minister of the day; but Tom was a benighted Tory, and
had thought nothing of these subjects till they were driven into his
mind by the strange mortality of the foxes around him.
Poor Mr. Morris was buried, and there was an end of him. The cloth
merchant's wife in Galway got the property; and, as far as we can
hear at present, is not likely to do as well with it as her husband
is with his bales of goods. No man perhaps more insignificant than
Mr. Robert Morris could have departed. He did nothing, and his
figure, as he walked about between Cong and Clonbur, could be well
spared. But his murder had given rise to feelings through the country
which were full of mischief and full of awe. He had lived most
inoffensively, and yet he had gone simply because it had occurred to
some poor ignorant tenant, who had held perhaps ten or fifteen acres
of land, out of which he had lived upon the potatoes grown from two
or three of them, that things would go better with him if he had not
a landlord to hurry him for rent! Then the tenant had turned in his
mind the best means of putting his landlord out of the way, and had
told himself that it was an easy thing to do. He had not, of his own,
much capacity for the use of firearms; but he had four pound ten,
which should have gone to the payment of his rent, and of this four
pound ten, fifteen shillings secured the services of some handy man
out of the next parish. He had heard the question of murder freely
discussed among his neighbours, and by listening to others had
learned the general opinion that there was no danger in it. So he
came to a decision, and Mr. Morris was murdered.
So far the question was solved between this tenant and this landlord;
but each one of the neighbours, as he thought of it, felt himself
bound to secrecy _pro bono publico_. There was a certain comfort in
this, and poor Bob Morris's death seemed likely to be passed over
with an easy freedom from suspicion. Any man might be got rid of
silently, and there need be no injurious results. But men among
themselves began to talk somewhat too freely, and an awe grew among
them as this man and that man were named as objectionable. And the
men so named were not all landlords or even agents. This man was a
sheriff's officer, and that a gamekeeper. The sheriffs' officers and
gamekeepers were not all murdered, but they were named, and a feeling
of terror crept cold round the hearts of those who heard the names.
Who was to be the keeper of the list and decide finally as to the
victims? Then suddenly a man went, and no one knew why he went. He
was making a fence between two fields, and it was whispered that he
had been cautioned not to make the fence. At any rate he had been
stoned to death, and though there must have been three at least at
the work, no one knew who had stoned him. Men began to whisper among
each other, and women also, and at last it was whispered to them that
they had better not whisper at all. Then they began to feel that not
only was secrecy to be exacted from them, but they were not to be
admitted to any participation in the secrecy.
And with such of the gentry as were left there had grown up
precautions which could not but fill the minds of the peasantry with
a vague sense of fear. They went about with rifle in their hands, and
were always accompanied by police. They had thick shutters made to
their windows, and barred themselves within their houses. Those who
but a few months since had been the natural friends of the people,
now appeared everywhere in arms against them. If it was necessary
that there should be intercourse between them, that intercourse took
place by means of a policeman. A further attempt at murder had been
made in the neighbourhood, and was so talked of that it seemed that
all kindly feeling had been severed. Men began to creep about and
keep out of the way lest they should be suspected; and, indeed,
it was the fact that there was hardly an able-bodied man in three
parishes to whom some suspicion did not attach itself.
And thus the women would ask for fresh murders, and would feel
disappointed when none were reported to them, craving, as it were,
for blood. And all this had come to pass certainly within the space
of two years! A sweeter-tempered people than had existed there had
been found nowhere; nor a people more ignorant, and possessing less
of the comforts of civilisation. But no evil was to be expected from
them, no harm came from them--beyond a few simple lies, which were
only harmful as acting upon their own character. As Tom Daly had
said, these very men were not capable of it a few months ago. The
tuition had come from America! That, no doubt, was true; but it had
come by Irish hearts and Irish voices, by Irish longings and Irish
ambition. Nothing could be more false than to attribute the evil to
America, unless that becomes American which has once touched American
soil. But there does grow up in New York, or thereabouts, a mixture
of Irish poverty with American wealth, which calls itself "Democrat,"
and forms as bad a composition as any that I know from which either
to replenish or to create a people.
A very little of it goes unfortunately a long way. It is like gin
made of vitriol when mingled with water. A small modicum of gin,
though it does not add much spirit to the water, will damnably defile
a large quantity. And this gin has in it a something of flavour which
will altogether deceive an uneducated palate. There is an alcoholic
afflatus which mounts to the brain and surrounds the heart and
permeates the veins, which for the moment is believed to be true gin.
But it makes itself known in the morning, and after a few mornings
tells its own tale too well. These "democrats" could never do us the
mischief. They are not sufficient, either in intellect or in number;
but there are men among us who have taught themselves to believe that
the infuriated gin drinker is the true holder of a new gospel.