The Northern Iron Part 2

CHAPTER II

The pa.s.senger took his seat in the bow of the boat and stripped off his coat in readiness to pull an oar. But no oar was offered to him. Maurice St. Clair seemed to have entirely forgotten the stranger's presence. The remarks of the American captain had angered him, and his mind worked on the insults hurled at him in parting. Neal was angry, too. They pulled viciously at the oars. From time to time Maurice broke out fiercely--

"An unmannerly brute! I wish I had him somewhere off the deck of his brig. I'd teach him how to speak to a gentleman.

"Is that his filthy tobacco at your feet, Brown-Eyes? Pitch it overboard.

"I suppose he's a specimen of the Republican breed. That's what comes of liberty and equality and French Jacobinism and Tom Paine and the Rights of Man. d.a.m.ned insolence I call it."

"I'd like to remind you, young man------." The words came with a quiet drawl from the pa.s.senger in the bow.

Maurice stopped rowing, and turned round.

"Well, what do you want to say? More insolence? Better be careful unless you want to try what it feels like to swim ash.o.r.e."

"I'd like to remind you, young man, that Captain Hercules Getty, of the State of Pennsylvania, who commands the brig 'Saratoga,' belongs to a nation which has fought for liberty and won it."

"What's that got to do with his insolence?"

"I reckon that an Irishman who hasn't fought and hasn't won ought to sing small when he's dealing with a citizen of the United States of America."

Neal turned in his seat. The stranger's reproach struck him as being unjust as well as being in bad taste. Maurice St. Clair was the son of a man who had done something for Ireland.

"You don't know who you're talking to," he said, "or what you're talking about. Lord Dunseveric, the father of the man in front of you, commanded the North Antrim Volunteers, and did his part in winning the independence of our Parliament."

The stranger looked steadily at Neal for sometime. Then he said--

"Is your name Neal Ward?"

"Yes. How do you know me?"

"You're the son of Micah Ward, the Presbyterian minister?"

"Yes."

"Well, I just guessed as much when I took a good look at your face. Will you ask your father when you go home whether the Volunteers won liberty for Irishmen, and what he thinks of the independence of an Irish Parliament filled with placemen and the nominees of a corrupt aristocracy?"

"Who are you?" asked Neal.

"My name's Donald Ward. I'm your father's youngest brother. I'm on my way to your father's house now, or I would be if you two young men would take to your oars again. If you don't I guess the first land we'll touch will be Greenland. We'd fetch Runkerry quicker if you'd pa.s.s forward the two thole pins I see at your feet and let me get an oar out in the bow.

The young lady in the stern can keep us straight with the helm."

"Give him the thole pins, Neal," said Maurice, "and then pull away."

"Just let me speak a word with you, Mr. St. Clair," said Donald Ward, as he hammered the thole pins into their holes. "You're angry with Captain Hercules Getty, and I don't altogether blame you. The captain's too fond of brag, and that's a fact. He can't hold himself in when he meets a Britisher. He's so almighty proud of the whipping his people gave the sc.u.m. But there's no need for you to be angry with me. I'm an Irishman myself, and not a Yankee. I fought in North Carolina, under General Nathaniel Greene, but I fought with Irishmen beside me, men from County Antrim and County Down, and they weren't the worst men in the army either. When I fight again it'll be in Ireland, and not in America. If I riled you I'm sorry for it, for you're an Irishman as well as myself."

Maurice's anger was shortlived.

"That's all right," he said. "Here, I say, you needn't pull that oar.

Neal and I will put you ash.o.r.e. We'll show that much hospitality to a County Antrim man from over the sea."

"Thank you," said Donald Ward. "Thank you. You mean well, and I take your words in the spirit you speak them; but when I sit in a boat I like to pull my own weight in her."

He shoved out his oar as he spoke, and fell into time with the long, steady stroke which Neal set.

Una leaned forward and spoke in a low voice to Neal, timing her words so that they reached him as he bent forward at the beginning of each stroke.

"Is'nt it curious, Neal, that Maurice and I are going back to welcome an aunt whom we have never seen, and that you are taking an unknown uncle home with you?"

Then, after a pause, she spoke again.

"It's like a kind of fate, Neal, one of the things which happen to people, and alter all their lives, and they can't do anything to help themselves. I wonder will we ever have good times together again, now that this aunt of mine and this uncle of yours have come?"

"Why shouldn't we?" said Neal.

"Oh, I don't know. But your uncle seems to be one of the people who make a great clatter about liberty and equality and the rights of man. And you know Aunt Estelle belonged to the old aristocracy in France. They wanted to guillotine her in the Terror. I don't think she will love Republicans."

"I suppose not," said Neal, gravely.

"But that won't prevent our being friends, Neal?"

"Una, my father is always talking about the struggle that's coming in Ireland. I don't know much about politics. I think I hate the whole thing. But if there is trouble I suppose that I shall be on one side and you on the other."

"Don't look so sad, Neal."

Then, as his spirits grew depressed, her's seemed to rise buoyantly. She raised her voice so that she could be heard in the bow of the boat.

"Mr. Donald Ward! Mr. Donald Ward! Your nephew, Neal, is telling me that when we have a reign of terror in Ireland you will make him cut off my head. Please promise me you won't."

Donald rested on his oar and gazed at the girl as she sat smiling at him in the stern of the boat.

"Young lady," he said, "don't trouble yourself. We didn't hurt woman or girl in America. No woman shall die a violent death in Ireland at the hands of the people."

"And no man, either?" cried Una. "Say it again, Mr. Donald Ward. Say 'And no man, either.' Can't we settle everything without killing men?"

"Men are different," said Donald. "It's right for men to die fighting, or die on the scaffold if need be."

A silence followed Donald Ward's words. In 1798 talk of death in battle or death on a scaffold moved even the youngest and most careless to serious thought. The world was full then of the kind of ideas for which men are well content to die, for the sake of which also they did not hesitate to shed blood. The Americans had set mankind a headline to copy in their Declaration of Independence. The French wrote Liberty with huge red flourishes which set the heart of Europe beating high. Italians were proclaiming a foreign army the liberators of their country, while Jacobins growled fiercely against the Pope. Kosciusko, in Poland, organised a futile revolution, and fell in the cause of national freedom. Even phlegmatic Englishmen caught the spirit of the times, hated intensely or wors.h.i.+pped enthusiastically that liberty which some saw as an imperial G.o.ddess for the sake of whose bare limbs and pale, n.o.ble face death might be gladly met; while others beheld in her a blood-spattered strumpet whirling in abandoned dance round gallows-altars which reeked with human sacrifice.

Ireland in those days was intellectually and spiritually alive. Men were quick to feel the influence of world-wide ideas, and in Ireland the love of liberty glowed brightly; nowhere more brightly than among the farmers and lower middle cla.s.ses of the north-eastern counties. The position was a strange one. The landed gentry, who themselves, a few years before, claimed and won from England the independence of their Parliament, grew frightened and drew back from the path of reform on which alone lay security for what they had got. The wealthier merchants and manufacturers, satisfied with the trade freedom which brought them prosperity, were averse to further change. The Presbyterians and the lower cla.s.ses generally were eager to press forward. They had conceived the idea of a real Irish nation, of Gael and Gall united, of Churchman, Roman Catholic and Dissenter working together for their country's good under a free const.i.tution. But it soon became apparent that the reforms they demanded would not be won by peaceful means. The natural terror of the cla.s.ses whose ascendancy or prosperity seemed to be threatened, the bribes and cajoleries of British statesmen, turned the hearts of those who ought to have been leaders from Ireland to England. The relentless logic, the clear-sighted grasp of the inevitable trend of events, and the restless energy of men like Wolfe Tone, changed a party of const.i.tutional reformers into a society of determined revolutionaries.

Threats of repression were answered by the formation of secret societies. Acts of tyranny, condoned or approved by terror-stricken magistrates, were silently endured by men filled with a grim hope that the day of reckoning was near at hand. Far-seeing English statesmen hoped to fish out of the troubled waters an act of national surrender from the Irish Parliament, and were not ill-pleased to see the sky grow darker. Everyone else, every Irishman, looked with dread at the gathering storm. One thing only was clear to them. There was coming a period of horror, of outrage and burning, of fighting and hanging, the sowing of an evil crop of fratricidal hatred whose gathering would last for many years.

The boat reached the little bay under the Black Rock. There was no need to drag her far up the beach now, for the tide was full. Working in silence, the three men laid her beside the broad-bottomed cobble used for working the salmon-net, and pushed her bow up against the coa.r.s.e gra.s.s which fringed the edge of the rocks. They carried the oars and sails into a fisherman's shelter perched on a rock beside the bay. Then Donald Ward turned to Maurice and said--

"I am going to my brother's house. I shall walk by the path along the cliffs, and my nephew will go with me. Your way home, unless I have entirely forgotten the roads, is not our way. We part here, therefore. I bid you good night, and thank you heartily."

"We had intended," said Maurice, "to walk home with Neal. We have time enough."