and she said, “For God’s sake, father, name not that unprincipled wretch to me any more.  I hate and detest him more than any man living he has no good quality to redeem him.  Ah!  Hanna, Hanna, and is it come to this?  The dream of my happiness has vanished, and I awake to nothing now but affliction and sorrow.  As for happiness, I must think of that no more, father, after breakfast, do you go up to that young man and tell him the resolution I have come to, and that it is over for ever between him and. me.”

Soon after this, she once more exacted a promise from them to observe a strict silence on the unhappy event which had occurred, and by no means ever to attempt offering her consolation.  These promises they religiously kept, and from this forth neither M’Mahon’s name nor his offence were made the topics of any conversation that occurred between them.

CHAPTER XX.—­M’Mahon is Denounced from the Altar

—­Receives his Sentence from Kathleen, and Resolves to Emigrate.

Whatever difficulty Bryan M’Mahon had among his family in defending the course he had taken at the election, he found that not a soul belonging to his own party would listen to any defense from him.  The indignation, obloquy, and spirit of revenge with which he was pursued and harassed, excited in his heart, as they would in that of any generous man conscious of his own integrity, a principle of contempt and defiance, which, however they required independence in him, only made matters far worse than they otherwise would have been.  He expressed neither regret nor repentance for having voted as he did; but on the contrary asserted with a good deal of warmth, that if the same course lay open to him he would again pursue it.

“I will never vote for a scoundrel,” said he, “and I don’t think that there is anything in my religion that makes it a duty on me to do so.  If my religion is to be supported by scoundrels, the sooner it is forced to depend on itself the better.  Major Vanston is a good landlord, and supports the rights of his tenantry, Catholic as well as Protestant; he saved me from ruin when my own landlord refused to interfere for me, an’ Major Vanston, if he’s conscientiously opposed to my religion, is an honest man at all events, and an honest man I’ll ever support against a rogue, and let their politics go where they generally do, go to the devil.”

Party is a blind, selfish, infatuated monster, brutal and vehement, that knows not what is meant by reason, justice, liberty, or truth.  M’Mahon, merely because he gave utterance with proper spirit to sentiments of plain common sense, was assailed by every description of abuse, until he knew not where to take refuge from that cowardly and ferocious tyranny which in a hundred shapes proceeded from the public mob.  On the Sunday after the election, his parish priest, one of those political fire-brands, who whether under a mitre or a white band, are equally disgraceful and detrimental to religion and the peaceful interests of mankind—­this man, we say, openly denounced him from the altar, in language which must have argued but little reverence for the sacred place from which it was uttered, and which came with a very bad grace from one who affected to be an advocate for liberty of conscience and a minister of peace.