Volume Ii Part 8 (1/2)
The house is stately and commodious, and more ancient than it appears to be,--so many additions have been made to it at different times. It has pa.s.sed through more than one siege, and in the '98 Mr. Kavanagh tells me the townspeople of Borris came up here and sought refuge. There are vast caverns under the house and grounds, doubtless made by taking out from the hill the stone used in building this house, and the fortresses which stood here before it. In these all sorts of stores were kept, and many of the people found shelter.
I need not say that there is a banshee at Borris--though no living witness, I believe, has heard its warning wail. But as we sat in the beautiful library, and watched the dying light of day, a lady present told us a tale more gruesome than many of those in which the ”psychical”
inquirers delight. She was sitting, she said, in an upper room of an ancient mansion here in Carlow, in which she lives, when, from the lawn below, there came up to her a low, sad, shrill cry--the croon of a woman, such as one hears from the mourners sitting among the turbaned tombstones of the hill of Eyoub at Constantinople. It startled her, and she held her breath and listened. She was alone, as she knew, in that part of the house, and the hall door below was unlocked, as is the fas.h.i.+on still in Ireland, despite all the troubles and turmoils. Again the sound came, and this time nearer to the house. Could it be the banshee? Again and again it rose and died away, each time nearer and nearer. Then, as she listened, all her nerves strung to the keenest sensibility, it came again, and now, beyond a doubt, within the hall below.
With an effort she rose from her chair, opened a door leading into a corridor running aside from the main stairway, and fled at full speed towards the wing in which she knew that she would find some of the maids. As she sped along she heard the cry again and again far behind her, as from a creature slowly and steadily mounting the grand stairway towards the room which she had just quitted.
She found the maids, who fell into a terrible fright when she told her story and dared not budge. So the bells were violently rung till the butler and footman appeared. To the first she said simply, ”There is a mad woman in this house--go and find her!”
”The man looked at me,” she said, ”as I spoke with a curious expression in his face as of one who thought, 'yes, there is a mad woman in the house, and she is not far to seek!'”
But the lady insisted, and the men finally went off on their quest. In the course of half an hour it was rewarded. The mad woman--a dangerous creature--who had wandered away from an asylum in the neighbourhood, was found curled up and fast asleep in the lady's own bed!
Fancy a delicate woman going alone into her bedroom at midnight to be suddenly confronted by an apparition of that sort!
BORRIS, _March 3d._--After a stroll on the lawn this morning, the wide and glorious prospect bathed in the light of a really soft spring day, I had a conversation with Mr. Kavanagh about the Land Corporation, of which he is the guiding spirit. This is a defensive organisation of the Irish landlords against the Land League. When a landlord has been driven into evicting his tenants, the next step, in the ”war against landlordism,” is to prevent other tenants from taking the vacated lands and cultivating them. This is accomplished by ”boycotting” any man who does this as a ”land-grabber.”
The ultimate sanction of the ”boycott” being ”murder,” derelict farms increased under this system very rapidly; and the Eleventh Commandment of the League, ”Thou shalt not pay the rent which thy neighbour hath refused to pay,” was in a fair way to dethrone the Ten Commandments of Sinai throughout Ireland, even before the formal adoption in 1886 of the ”Plan of Campaign.”
Mr. Gladstone would perhaps have hit the facts more accurately, if, instead of calling an eviction in Ireland a ”sentence of death,” he had called the taking of a tenancy a sentence of death. Mr. Hussey at Lixnaw had two tenants, Edmond and James Fitzmaurice. Edmond Fitzmaurice was ”evicted” in May 1887; but he was taken into the house of a neighbour, made very comfortable, and still lives. James Fitzmaurice took, for the sake of the family, the land from which Edmond was evicted, and for this he was denounced as a ”land-grabber,” boycotted, and finally shot dead in the presence of his daughter.
At a meeting in Dublin in the autumn of 1885, a parish priest, the Rev.
Mr. Cantwell, described it as a ”cardinal virtue” that ”no one should take a farm from which another had been evicted,” and called upon the people who heard him to ”pa.s.s any such man by unnoticed, and treat him as an enemy in their midst.” Public opinion and the law, if not the authorities of his church would make short work of any priest who talked in this fas.h.i.+on in New York. But in Ireland, and under the British Government, it seems they order things differently. So it occurred one day to the landlords thus a.s.sailed, as it did to the sea-lions of the Cape of Good Hope when the French sailors attacked them, that they might defend themselves.
To this end the Land Corporation was inst.i.tuted, with a considerable capital at its back, and Mr. Kavanagh at its head. The ”plan of campaign” of this Corporation is to take over from the landlords derelict lands and cultivate them, stocking them where that is necessary.
It is in this way that the derelict lands on the Ponsonby property at Youghal are now worked. But Mr. Kavanagh tells me that the men employed by the Corporation, of whom Father Keller spoke as a set of desperadoes or ”_enfants perdus_,” are really a body of resolute and capable working men farmers. Many, but by no means all of them, are Protestants and Ulstermen; and that they are up to their work would seem to be shown by the fact stated to me, that in no case so far have any of them been deterred and driven off from the holdings confided to them. A great part of the Luggacurren property of Lord Lansdowne is now worked by the Corporation; and Mr. Kavanagh was kind enough to let me see the accounts, which indicate a good business result for the current year on that property. This is all very interesting. But what a picture it presents of social demoralisation! And what is to be the end of it all?
Can a country be called civilised in which a farmer with a family to maintain, having the capital and the experience necessary to manage successfully a small farm, is absolutely forbidden, on pain of social ostracism, and eventually on pain of death, by a conspiracy of his neighbours, to take that farm of its lawful owner at what he considers to be a fair rent? And how long can any civilisation of our complex modern type endure in a country in which such a state of things tolerated by the alleged Government of that country has to be met, and more or less partially mitigated, by deviating to the cultivation of farms rendered in this way derelict large amounts of capital which might be, and ought to be, far more profitably employed in other ways?
Mr. Kavanagh, after serving the office of High Sheriff thirty years ago, first for Kilkenny, and then for Carlow, sat in Parliament for fourteen years, from 1866 to 1880, as an Irish county member. He has a very large property here in Carlow, and property also in Wexford, and in Kilkenny, and was sworn into the Privy Council two years ago. If the personal interests and the family traditions of any man alive can be said to be rooted in the Irish soil, this is certainly true of his interests and his traditions. How can the peace and prosperity of Ireland be served by a state of things which condemns an Irishman of such ties and such training to expend his energies and his ability in defending the elementary right of Paddy O'Rourke to take stock and work a ten-acre farm on terms that suit himself and his landlord?
In the afternoon we took a delightful walk through the woods, Mr.
Kavanagh going with us on horseback. Every hill and clump of trees on this large domain he knows, and he led us like a master of woodcraft through all manner of leafy byways to the finest points of view. The Barrow flows past Borris, making pictures at every turn, and the banks on both sides are densely and beautifully wooded. We came in one place upon a sawmill at work in the forest, and Mr. Kavanagh showed us with pride the piles of excellent timber which he turns out here. But he took a greater pride in a group, sacred from the axe, of really magnificent Scotch firs, such as I had certainly not expected to find in Ireland.
Nearer the mansion are some remarkable Irish yews. The gardens are of all sorts and very extensive, but we found the head-gardener bitterly lamenting the destruction by a fire in one of the conservatories of more than six thousand plants just prepared for setting out.
There are many curious old books and papers here, and a student of early Irish history might find matter to keep him well employed for a long time in this region. It was from this region and the race which ruled it, of which race Mr. Kavanagh is the actual representative, that the initiative came of the first Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. Strongbow made what, from the Anglo-Norman point of view, was a perfectly legitimate bargain, with a dispossessed prince to help him to the recovery of his rights on the understanding that these rights, when recovered, should pa.s.s in succession to himself through the only daughter of the prince, whom he proposed to marry. It does not appear that Strongbow knew, or that Dermot MacMorrogh cared to tell him, how utterly unlike the rights of an Anglo-Norman prince were those of the elective life-tenant of an Irish princ.i.p.ality. FitzStephen, the son by her second marriage of Nesta, the Welsh royal mistress of Henry Beauclerk, and his cousin, Maurice Fitzgerald, the leaders into Ireland of the Geraldines, were no more clear in their minds about this than Strongbow, and it is to the original muddle thus created that Professor Richey doubtless rightly refers the worst and most troublesome complications of the land question in Ireland. The distinction between the King's lieges and the ”mere Irish,” for example, is unquestionably a legal distinction, though it is continually and most mischievously used as if it were a proof of the race-hatred borne by the Normans and Saxons in Ireland from the first against the Celts. The O'Briens, the O'Neills, the O'Mullaghlins, the O'Connors, and the M'Morroghs, ”the five bloods,”
as they are called, were certainly Celts, but whether in virtue of their being, or claiming to be, the royal races respectively of Minister, of Ulster, of Meath, of Connaught, and of Leinster, or from whatever other reason, these races were ”within the king's law,” and were never ”mere Irish” from the first planting of the Anglo-Norman power in Ireland. The case of a priest, Shan O'Kerry, ”an Irish enemy of the king,” presented ”contrary to the form of statute” to the vicarage of Lusk, in the reign of Edward IV. (1465), ill.u.s.trates this. An Act of Parliament was pa.s.sed to declare the aforesaid ”Shan O'Kerry,” or ”John of Kevernon,” to be ”English born, and of English nation,” and that he might ”hold and enjoy the said benefice.”
There is a genealogy here of the M'Morroghs and Kavanaghs, most gorgeously and elaborately gotten up many years ago for Mr. Kavanagh's grandfather, which shows how soon the Norman and the native strains of blood become commingled. When one remembers how much Norman blood must have gone even into far-off Connaught when King John, in the early part of the thirteenth century, coolly gave away that realm of the O'Connors to the De Burgos, and how continually the English of the Pale fled from the exactions inflicted upon them by their own people, and sought refuge ”among the savage and mere Irish,” one cannot help thinking that the”
Race Question” has been ”worked for at least all it is worth” by philosophers bent on unravelling the 'snarl' of Irish affairs. If this genealogy may be trusted, there was little to choose between the ages which immediately preceded and the ages which followed the Anglo-Norman invasion in the matter of respect for human life. Celtic chiefs and Norman knights ”died in their boots” as regularly as frontiersmen in Texas. One personage is designated in the genealogy as ”the murderer,”
for the truly Hibernian reason, so far as appears, that he was himself murdered while quite a youth, and before he had had a chance to murder more than three or four of his immediate relatives. It was as if the son of Geoffrey Plantagenet and the Lady Constance should be branded in history as ”Arthur, the a.s.sa.s.sin.”
BORRIS, _March 4th._--This is a staunch Protestant house, and Mr.
Kavanagh himself reads a Protestant service every morning. But there is little or nothing apparently in this part of Ireland of the bitter feeling about and against the Catholics which exists in the North. A very lively and pleasant Catholic gentleman came in to-day informally and joined the house party at luncheon. We all walked out over the property afterwards, visiting quite a different region from that which we saw yesterday--different but equally beautiful and striking, and this Catholic gentleman cited several cases which had fallen within his own knowledge of priests who begin to feel their moral control of the people slipping away from them through the operation of the ”Plan of Campaign.”
I told him what I had heard in regard to one such priest from my ecclesiastical friend in Cork. ”It does not surprise me at all,” he said, ”and, indeed, I not very long ago read precisely such another letter from a priest in a somewhat similar position. I read it with pain and shame as a Catholic,” he continued, ”for it was simply a complete admission that the priest, although entirely convinced that his paris.h.i.+oners were making most unfair demands upon their landlord to whom the letter was addressed, felt himself entirely powerless to bring them to a sense of their misconduct.” ”Had this priest given in his adhesion to the Plan of Campaign?” I asked. ”Yes,” was the reply, ”and it was this fact which had broken his hold on the people when he tried to bring them to abandon their att.i.tude under the Plan. His letter was really nothing more nor less than an appeal to the landlord, and that landlord a Protestant, to help him to get out of the hole into which he had put himself.”
Of the tenants and their relation to the village despots who administer the Plan of Campaign, this gentleman had many stories also to tell of the same tenor with all that I have hitherto heard on this subject.