Peg O My Heart | Page 7

ye do? Engage them to be married. To you marriage is the safeguard against sin. And what ARE such marriages? Hunger marryin' thirst! Poverty united to misery! Men and women ignorant and stunted in mind and body, bound together by a sacrament, givin' them the right to bring others, equally distorted, into the wurrld. And when they're born you baptise them, and you have more souls entered on the great register for the Holy Church. Bodies livin' in perpetual torment, with a heaven wavin' at them all through their lives as a reward for their suffering here. I tell ye ye're wrong! Ye're wrong! Ye're wrong! The misery of such marriages will reach through all the generations to come. I'd rather see vice--vice that burns out and leaves scar-white the lives it scorches. There is more sin in the HEARTS and MINDS of these poor, wretched, ill-mated people than in the sinks of Europe. There is some hope for the vicious. Intelligence and common-sense will wean them from it. But there is no hope for the people whose lives from the cradle to the grave are drab and empty and sordid and wretched."
As O'Connell uttered this terrible arraignment of the old order of protecting society by early and indiscriminate marriages, it seemed as if the mantle of some modern prophet had fallen on him. He had struck at the real keynote of Ireland's misery to-day. The spirit of oppression followed them into the privacy of their lives. Even their wives were chosen for them by their teachers. Small wonder the English government could enforce brutal and unjust laws when the very freedom of choosing their mates and of having any voice in the control of their own homes was denied them.
To Father Cahill such words were blasphemy. He looked at O'Connell in horror.
"Have ye done?" he asked.
"What else I may have to say will be said on St. Kernan's Hill this afternoon."
"There will be no meetin' there to-day," cried the priest.
"Come and listen to it," replied the agitator.
"I've forbidden my people to go."
"They'll come if I have to drag them from their homes."
"I've warned the resident-magistrate. The police will be there if ye thry to hold a meetin'."
"We'll outnumber them ten to one."
"There'll be riotin' and death." "Better to die in a good cause than to live in a bad one," cried O'Connell. "It's the great dead who lead the world by their majesty. It's the bad livin' who keep it back by their infamy."
"Don't do this, Frank O'Connell. I ask you in the name of the Church in which ye were baptised--by me."
"I'll do it in the name of the suffering people I was born among."
"I command you! Don't do this!"
"I can hear only the voice of my dead father saying: 'Go on!'"
"I entreat you--don't!"
"My father's voice is louder than yours, Father Cahill."
"Have an old man's tears no power to move ye?"
O'Connell looked at the priest. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. He made no effort to staunch them. O'Connell hesitated, then he said firmly
"My father wept in the ditch when he was dyin', dying in sight of his home. Mine was the only hand that wiped away his tears. I can see only HIS to-day, Father."
"I'll make my last appeal. What good can this meetin' do? Ye say the people are ignorant and wretched. Why have them batthered and shot down by the soldiers?"
"It has always been the martyrs who have made a cause. I am willin' to be one. I'd be a thraitor if I passed my life without lifting my voice and my hands against my people's oppressors."
"Ye're throwin' yer life away, Frank O'Connell."
"I wouldn't be the first and I won't be the last"
"Nothing will move ye?" cried the priest.
"One thing only," replied the agitator.
"And what is that?"
"Death!" and O'Connell strode abruptly away.

CHAPTER II
THE PANORAMA OF A LOST YOUTH
As O'Connell hurried through the streets of the little village thoughts surged madly through his brain. It was in this barren spot he was born and passed his youth. Youth! A period of poverty and struggle: of empty dreams and futile hopes. It passed before him now as a panorama. There was the doctor's house where his father hurried the night he was born. How often had his mother told him of that night of storm when she gave her last gleam of strength in giving him life! In storm he was born: in strife he would live. The mark was on him.
Now he came to the little schoolhouse where he first learned to read. Facing it Father Cahill's tiny church, where he had learned to pray. Beyond lay the green on which he had his first fight. It was about his father. Bruised and bleeding, he crept home that day-- beaten. His mother cried over him and