Next morning the Dublin daily papers laid themselves out to make the most of the sensational fight at the Rotunda. Even the habitually cautious Irish Times felt that the occasion justified the expression of an opinion, and that there would be no serious risk of alienating the sympathies of subscribers and advertisers by condemning the bloodshed. It published an exceedingly dignified and stodgy leading article, drawing the largest and finest words from the dictionary, and weaving them with extraordinary art into sentences which would have been creditable to anyone bent upon imitating the style of Dr. Samuel Johnson. The British Empire and the whole of civilized Europe were called upon to witness the unspeakably deplorable consequences which invariably followed the habitual neglect of the cultivation of the elementary decencies of public life. The paper disclaimed any sympathy with either of the belligerent parties, and pointed out with sorrowful solemnity that if the principles sedulously inculcated upon its readers in its own columns were persistently flouted and contemned by those who claimed the position of national representatives, little else except a repetition at frequent intervals of the painful and humiliating scenes of the night before could possibly be anticipated by reasonable observers of the general trend of democratic institutions. The Daily Express openly exulted over the rioters. Its leading article—the staff may have danced in a ring round the office table while composing it—declared that now at length the Irish had proved to the world that they were all, without a solitary exception, irredeemably vicious corner-boys. Miss Augusta Goold was warmly praised for having demonstrated once for all that ‘patriotism’ ought to be written ‘Pat riotism.’ Deep regret was expressed that those who attended the meeting had not been armed with revolvers instead of stones, and that the platform had not been defended with Maxim guns instead of comparatively innocuous wooden chairs. Had modern weapons of precision been used the Daily Express would have been able to congratulate mankind on getting rid of quite a considerable number of Irishmen.

The Freeman’s Journal and the Daily Independent were awkwardly situated. Their sympathies were entirely with Mr. O’Rourke, and they were exceedingly angry with Miss Goold for interfering with the collection of funds for the Parliamentary party. At the same time, they felt a difficulty in denouncing her, not for want of suitable language—the Irish Nationalist press has a superb command of words which a self-respecting dictionary would hesitate to recognise—but because they felt that push of the horns of the dilemma on which O’Rourke had been impaled, and they were obliged to sand their denunciations between layers of stoutest pro-Boer sentiment.

All four papers contained reports of the proceedings which were practically identical up to a certain point. It was about the commencement of the actual bloodshed that they differed. The Irish Times reporter believed that Mr. Shea had begun the fray by striking Augusta Goold behind the ear with his clenched fist. The Daily Express man claimed to have overheard Mr. O’Rourke urging his friends to brain a member of the audience with a chair. The Freeman’s Journal held that Augusta Goold’s supporters had come into the hall supplied with huge stones, which, at a given signal, they had flung at the inoffensive members of Parliament who occupied the platform, adding, as a corroborative detail, that the lady who accompanied Augusta Goold had twice kicked the prostrate Mr. Shea in the stomach. The Daily Independent advanced the ingenious theory that the contest had been precipitated by a malevolent student of Trinity College, who had flung an apple of discord—on this occasion a jagged paving-stone of unusual size—into the midst of a group of ladies and gentlemen who were peacefully discussing a slight difference of opinion among themselves. Beyond this point none of the papers gave any account of the proceedings, all four reporters having recognised that, not being retained as war correspondents, they were not called upon to risk their lives on the battlefield. The accounts all closed with the information that the wounded had been carried to Jervis Street Hospital, and were under treatment suitable to their injuries. Hyacinth had suffered a slight concussion of the brain and a flesh wound. Other sufferers were in the same ward, Mr. Shea himself occupying a bed, so that Hyacinth had the satisfaction of seeing him stretched out, a melancholy figure, with a bandage concealing most of his red hair. After the surgeon had finished his rounds for the morning a police official visited the sufferers, and made a careful note of their names and addresses. He inquired in a perfunctory manner whether any of them wished to swear an information. No one, except Mr. Shea, was sufficiently satisfied with his own share of the meeting to wish for more fame than was unavoidable. As no further use was ever made of Mr. Shea’s narrative, it may be presumed that the authorities regarded it as wanting in accuracy. No blame, however, ought to be attached to the author for any petty deviation from the truth of which he may have been guilty. No man’s mind is perfectly clear on the morning after he has been struck on the head with a stone, and perhaps afterwards kicked twice in the stomach by a lady journalist. Besides, all members of Parliament are, in virtue of their office, ‘honourable gentlemen.’

An excited and sympathetic nurse provided Hyacinth with copies of the four morning papers, which he read with interest and a good deal of amusement. Only the account in the Daily Independent caused him any uneasiness. No doubt, as he fully recognised, the suggestion about the Trinity student was nothing but a wild guess on the part of the reporter. It was highly unlikely that anyone would seriously consider a theory so intrinsically improbable. Still, if the faintest suspicion of the part he had played reached the ears of the college authorities, he felt that his career as a divinity student was likely to be an extremely brief one. His chief fear was that a prolonged absence from college would give rise to inquiry, and that his bandages would excite suspicion when he reappeared. Fortunately, the house surgeon decided that he was sufficiently recovered to be allowed to leave the hospital early in the afternoon. The boot which had put an end to his share in the riot had raised its bruise under his hair, so he was able to remove the bandages from his head as soon as he got into the street. There still remained a long strip of plaster meant to keep a dressing of iodoform in its place over the cut on his cheek which Mr. Shea’s chair-leg had inflicted. This he could not get off, and thinking it wiser to make his entry into college after nightfall, he sought a refuge in Mary O’Dwyer’s rooms.

He found the poetess laid on a sofa and clad in a blue dressing-gown. She stretched a hand of welcome to Hyacinth, and then, before he had time to take it, began to laugh immoderately. The laughing fit ended in sobs, and then tears flowed from her eyes, which she mopped convulsively with an already damp pocket-handkerchief. Before she had recovered sufficient self-possession to speak, she signed to Hyacinth to fetch a bottle of smelling-salts from the chimney-piece. He hastened to obey, and found himself kneeling beside the sofa, holding the bottle to her nose. After a while she recovered sufficiently to tell him that she had not slept at all during the night, and felt extremely unwell and quite unstrung in consequence. Another fit of immoderate and tearful laughter followed, and Hyacinth, embarrassed and alarmed, fetched a tumbler of soda-water from the syphon on the sideboard. The lady refused to swallow any, and, just as he had made up his mind to risk an external application, recovered again. During the lucid interval which followed she informed him that his own conduct had been superb and heroic. What seemed to be an effort to celebrate his achievements in extemporary verse brought on another fit. Hyacinth determined to risk an appearance in the college square in broad daylight rather than continue his ministrations. While he was searching for his hat Miss O’Dwyer became suddenly quite calm, and began to explain to him how immensely the cause of Ireland’s independence had benefited by the demonstration in the Rotunda. Hyacinth listened anxiously, waiting for the next explosion, and experienced very great relief when the door opened and Augusta Goold walked in.

Unlike Mary O’Dwyer, she was entirely mistress of herself. Her cheeks were not a shade paler than usual, nor her hand at all less cool and firm. She stretched herself, after her usual fashion, in the largest available chair and lit a cigarette.

‘You look excited, my dear Mary,’ she said—‘a little overexcited, perhaps. Have you had tea? No? Perhaps you will be so kind as to ring the bell, Mr. Conneally.’

Mary O’Dwyer repeated the information she had given Hyacinth about her sleepless night, and complimented Augusta Goold on her nerve.

‘As for poor little me,’ she went on, ‘I’m like a—like a—you remember the kind of thing, don’t you?—like a—I’m not sure if I know the name of the thing myself.’

She relapsed into a weak giggle, and Hyacinth stooped for the bottle of smelling-salts, which had rolled under the sofa. Augusta Goold was much less sympathetic. She fixed her with a strong stare of amazement and disgust. Apparently this treatment was the right one, for the giggling stopped almost immediately.

‘I see you have got some sticking-plaster on your face, Mr. Conneally,’ she said, when Mary O’Dwyer had quieted down.

‘Yes,’ said Hyacinth, ‘and a good-sized bump behind my ear.’

‘I suppose this business will be very awkward for you in college. Will they turn you out?’

‘I’m sure they will if they find out that I threw that stone at Shea.’

‘You made a very good shot,’ said Augusta, smiling at the recollection. ‘But how on earth did you come to have a stone that size in the hall with you?’

Hyacinth told the story of the man who had been felled by the chair and his murderous bequest.

‘That’s the proper spirit,’ said Augusta. ‘I admire that man, and he couldn’t have passed his stone on to better hands than yours. Shea went down as if he had been shot. I was afraid of my life he would clutch at my skirts as he fell or squirm up against me after he was down. But he lay quite still. By the way, Mary, I suppose your dress was ruined?’

Mary O’Dwyer was quite subdued.

‘It was torn,’ she said meekly enough.

‘Have you another one?’

‘Of course I have. I’ve three others, besides some old ones.’

‘Well, then, you’d better go and put on one of them. An old one will do. It’s disgusting to see a woman slopping about in a dressing-gown at this time of day. I’ll have tea ready when you come back.’

Miss O’Dwyer obeyed sulkily. She wished very much that Augusta Goold had stopped at home. It would have been a great deal pleasanter to have gone on practising hysterics with Hyacinth as a sympathetic spectator. When the door was shut Augusta Goold turned to Hyacinth again.

‘That’s the worst of women’—apparently she did not consider herself as one of the sex—‘they are all right at the time (nothing could have been better than Mary’s behaviour at the meeting), but they collapse afterwards in such idiotic ways. But I want to talk to you about yourself. I owe you a good turn for what you did last night. Only for you, I think Shea would have dared to touch me, and then very likely I should have killed him, and there might have been trouble afterwards.’ She spoke quite calmly, but Hyacinth had very little doubt that she meant exactly what she said. ‘Grealy of course, was useless. One might have expected him to give utterance to an ancient tribal war-cry, but he didn’t even do that. Tim Halloran got frightened when the row began. I noticed him dodging about behind Mary and me, and I mean to let him know what I think about him. It’s you I have to thank, and I won’t forget it. If you get into trouble over this business in college, come to me, and I will see you straight. In fact, if you like to give up the divinity student business at once, I dare say I can put you in the way of earning an honester livelihood.’

Hyacinth was gratified at the way Augusta Goold spoke to him. Since the evening on which he had given his opinion about the morality of desertion and murder he had been conscious of a coolness in her manner. Now he had apparently reinstated himself in her good graces. Praise, even for an act he was secretly ashamed of, and gratitude, though he by no means recognised that he deserved it, were pleasant to him. He promised to remember the offer of help, but declined for the present to commit his future to the keeping of so bloodthirsty a patroness.

Curiously enough, Hyacinth’s reception in college was a great deal more cordial after the Rotunda meeting than it had ever been before. For a while the battle which had been fought at their doors superseded the remoter South African warfare as a topic of conversation among the students. Their sympathies were with Augusta Goold. Even members of the divinity classes suffered themselves to be lured from their habitual worship of respectability so far as to express admiration for the dramatic picturesqueness of the part she played. It is true that the lady herself was called by names universally resented by women, and that the broadest slanders were circulated about her character. Still, a halo of glory hung round her. It was felt that she had done a surprisingly courageous thing when she faced Mr. O’Rourke on his own platform. Also, she had behaved with a certain dignity, neither throwing chairs nor stones at her opponents. Then, she was an undeniably beautiful woman, a fact which made its inevitable appeal to the young men. The mere expression of sympathy with this flamboyant and scandal-smeared heroine brought with it a delightful flavour of gay and worldly vice. It was pretty well known that Hyacinth was a friend of Miss Goold’s, and it was rumoured that he had earned his piece of sticking-plaster in her defence. No one knew exactly what he had done or how much he had suffered, but a great many men were anxious to know. Very much to his own surprise, he received a number of visitors in his rooms. Men who had been the foremost of his tormentors came, ostensibly to inquire for his health, in reality to glean details of the fight at the Rotunda. Certain medical students of the kind which glory in any kind of row openly congratulated him on his luck in being present on such an occasion. Men who claimed to be fast, and tried to impress their acquaintances with the belief that they indulged habitually in wild scenes of revelry, courted Hyacinth, and boasted afterwards of their second-hand acquaintance with Miss Goold. It became the fashion to be seen arm-in-arm with him in the quadrangle, and to inquire from him in public for ‘Finola.’

This new popularity by no means pleased Hyacinth. He was not at all proud of his share in the Rotunda meeting, and lived in daily dread of being recognised as the assailant of Mr. Shea. He knew, too, that he was making no way with the better class of students. The men whose faces he liked were more than ever shy of making his acquaintance. The sub-lecturers and minor professors in the divinity school were coldly contemptuous in their manner, and it seemed to him that even Dr. Henry was less friendly. He became desperately anxious to get out of a position which he found more intolerable than the original isolation. He applied himself with extreme diligence to his studies, even affecting an interest, unnatural for the most pious, in the expositions given by learned doctors of the Thirty-nine Articles. At lectures on Church history he made notes about the vagaries of heretics so assiduously that the professor began to hope that there existed one student at least who took an interest in the Christological controversies of the sixth century. He never ventured back again to the Wednesday prayer-meeting, but he performed many attendances beyond the required minimum at the college chapel. Morning after morning he dragged himself from his bed and hurried across the dusky quadrangle to take his part in the mutilated matins with which the college authorities see fit to usher in the day. He even went to hear the sermons delivered on Friday afternoons, homilies so painful that the preachers themselves recognise an extraordinary merit in enduring them, and allow that submission of the ears to one of them is to be reckoned as equal to two ordinary acts of devotion.

It is to be hoped that Hyacinth derived some remote benefit from the discipline to which he subjected himself, for the immediate results were not satisfactory. He seemed no nearer winning the respect of the more serious students, and Dr. Henry’s manner showed no signs of softening into friendliness. His surfeit of theology bred in him a dislike of the subject. The solemn platitudes which were posed as expositions of the creeds affected his mind much as the expurgated life histories of maiden aunts do the newly-emancipated school-girl. The relentless closing in of argument upon a single previously settled doctrine woke in him a desire to break through at some point and breathe again in the open. He began to fear that he was becoming hopelessly irreligious. His morning devotions in the foggy atmosphere of the chapel did not touch the capacity for enthusiasm within him. The vague splendour of his father’s meditations had left him outside, indeed, but sure that within there lay a great reality. But now religion had come to seem an altogether narrower thing, a fenced off, well-ordered garden in which useful vegetables might be cultivated, but very little inspiring to the soul.

The unwelcome attention of the students whose friendship he did not desire, and his increasing dislike for the work he was expected to do, led him to spend more and more of his time with Augusta Goold and her friends. He found in their society that note of enthusiasm which he missed in the religion of the college. He responded warmly to their passionate devotion to the dream of an independent Irish Republic. He felt less conscious of his want of religion in their company. With the exception of Augusta Goold herself, the members of the coterie were professedly Roman Catholics; but this made little or no difference in their intercourse with him. What he found in their ideals was a substitute for religion, a space where his enthusiasm might extend itself. He became, as he realized his own position clearly, very doubtful whether he ought to continue his college course. It did not seem likely that he would in the end be able to take Holy Orders, and to remain in the divinity school without that intention was clearly foolish. On the other hand, he shrank from inflicting what he knew would be a painful disappointment on his father. It happened that before the term ended his connection with the divinity school was cut in a way that saved him from the responsibility of forming a decision.

He was a regular attendant at the lectures of Dr. Spenser, who had never from the first disguised his dislike and contempt for Hyacinth. This gentleman was one day explaining to his class the difference between evidence which leads to a high degree of probability and a demonstration which produces absolute certainty. The subject was a dry one, and quite unsuited to Dr. Spenser, whose heart was set on maintaining a reputation for caustic wit. He cast about for an illustration which would at once make clear the distinction and enliven his lecture. His eye lit upon Hyacinth, upon whose cheek there still burned a long red scar. Dr. Spenser’s face brightened.

‘For instance, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘if I should reason from the fact that our friend Mr. Conneally affects the society of certain charming ladies of doubtful reputation, like Miss Goold, to the conclusion that Mr. Conneally is himself a Nationalist, I should only have arrived at a probable conclusion. The degree of probability might be very high; still, I should have no right to regard my conclusion as absolutely certain.’

The class tittered delightedly. Dr. Spenser proceeded without heeding a deep flush on Hyacinth’s face, which might have warned a wiser man that an explosion was coming.

‘If I should then proceed to reason thus: All Nationalists are rebels and potential murderers—Mr. Conneally is a Nationalist; therefore Mr. Conneally is a rebel and potential murderer—I should, assuming the truth of my minor premise, have arrived at a certainty.’

The syllogism was greeted with loud applause. Hyacinth started to his feet. For a time he could only gasp for breath to utter a reply, and Dr. Spenser, secure in the conviction of his own intellectual and social superiority to the son of a parson from Connemara, determined to pursue his prey.

‘Does Mr. Conneally,’ he asked with a simper, ‘propose to impugn the accuracy of my induction or the logic of my deduction?’

The simper and the number of beautiful long words which Dr. Spenser had succeeded in collecting together into one sentence provoked a sustained clapping of hands and stamping of feet from the class. Hyacinth rapidly regained his self-possession, and was surprised at his own coolness when he replied:

‘I should say, sir, that a man who makes an induction holding up a lady to ridicule is probably a cad, and that the cad who makes a deduction confusing patriotism with murder is certainly a fool.’

A report of Hyacinth’s speech was handed to Dr. Henry, with a suggestion that expulsion from the divinity school was the only suitable punishment. Hyacinth did not look forward with any pleasure to the interview to which he was summoned. He was agreeably surprised when he entered the professor’s room. Dr. Henry offered him a chair.

‘I hear,’ he said—his tone was severe, but a barely perceptible gleam of humorous appreciation flashed across his eyes as he spoke—‘that you have been exceedingly insolent to Dr. Spenser.’

‘I don’t know, sir, whether you heard the whole story, but if you did you will surely recognise that Dr. Spenser was gratuitously insulting to me.’

‘Quite so,’ said Dr. Henry. ‘I recognise that, but the question is, What am I to do with you now? What would you do if you were in my place? I should like to know your views of the best way out of the situation.’

Hyacinth was silent.

‘You see,’ Dr. Henry went on, ‘we can’t have our divinity lecturers called fools and cads before their classes. I should be afraid myself to deliver a lecture in your presence if I thought I was liable to that kind of interruption.’

‘I think, sir,’ said Hyacinth, ‘that the best thing will be for me to leave the divinity school.’

‘I think so, too. But leaving our divinity school need not mean that you give up the idea of taking Holy Orders. I have a very high opinion of your abilities, Conneally—so high that I should not like the Church to lose your services. At the same time, you are not at present the kind of man whom I could possibly recommend to any Irish Bishop. Your Nationalist principles are an absolute bar to your working in the Church of Ireland.’

‘I wonder, sir, how you can call our Church the Church of Ireland, and in the same breath say that there is no room for a Nationalist in her. Don’t the two things contradict each other.’

Dr. Henry’s eyes twinkled again. There spread over his mouth a smile of tolerant amusement.

‘My dear boy, I’m not going to let you trap me into a discussion of that question. Theoretically, I have no doubt you would make out an excellent case. National Church, National spirit, National politics—Irish Church, Irish nation, Irish ideas. They all go excellently together, don’t they? And yet the facts are as I state them. A Nationalist clergyman in the Church of Ireland would be just as impossible as an English Nonconformist in the Court of Louis Quatorze. After all, in this life one has got to steer one’s course among facts, and they’re sharp things which knock holes in the man who disregards them. Now, what I propose to you is this: Put off your ordination for three years or so. Take up schoolmastaring. I will undertake to get you a post in an English school. Your politics won’t matter over there, because no one will in the least understand what you mean. Work hard, think hard, read hard. Mix with the bigger world across the Channel. See England and realize what England is and what her Empire means. Don’t be angry with me for saying that, long before the three years are over, you’ll have come to see that what you call patriotism is nothing else than parochialism of a particularly narrow and uninstructed kind. Then come back here to me, and I’ll arrange for your ordination. You’ll do the best of good work when you’ve grown up a bit, and I’ll see you a Bishop before I die.’

‘I shall always be grateful to you,’ said Hyacinth. ‘I shall never forget your kindness, and the way you’ve treated me; but I can’t do what you ask.’

‘Oh, I’m not going to take no for an answer,’ said Dr. Henry. ‘Go home to the West and think it over. Talk to your father about your future. Write to me if you like about your plans, and remember my offer is open six months or a year hence. You’ll be the same man then that you are now—I mean, in character. I’m not afraid of your turning out badly. You may think wrong-headedly, but I’m sure you’ll not act disgracefully.’