Читать книгу The Northern Iron - George A. Birmingham - Страница 5

Table of Contents

The passenger 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. Damned insolence I call it.”

“I’d like to remind you, young man———.” The words came with a quiet drawl from the passenger 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 ashore.”

“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 pass 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 scum. 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 ashore. 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 worshipped enthusiastically that liberty which some saw as an imperial goddess for the sake of whose bare limbs and pale, noble 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 classes 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 classes 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 constitution. But it soon became apparent that the reforms they demanded would not be won by peaceful means. The natural terror of the classes 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 constitutional 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 coarse grass 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.”

His sister, quicker than he to take a hint, pulled him by the arm, and whispered to him. Then she spoke aloud.

“Good night, Mr. Donald Ward. Good night, Neal. Perhaps we shall see you to-morrow.”

The uncle and nephew climbed the hill which led to the top of the cliffs together. For a time neither of them spoke. The elder man seemed to be absorbed in picking out the landmarks which had once been very familiar to him. At last he spoke to Neal.

“Does your father wish you to have Lord Dun-severic’s son and daughter for your friends?”

Neal hesitated for a moment, and then answered.

“He knows that they are my friends.”

“It would be better if they were not your friends. I have heard of Lord Dunseveric, a strong man and an able man, a good friend of his own class, not a good friend of the people.”

He paused. Neal wished to speak, to say some good of Lord Dunseveric; to declare the strength of his friendship for Maurice. He could not speak as he wished to speak. An unfamiliar feeling of oppression tied his tongue. His uncle’s will dominated his.

“What is the girl’s name?” asked Donald.

“Una.”

“Yes, and what did her brother call her?”

“Brown-Eyes.” Neal felt as if the words were dragged from him.

“Are you the lover of this Una Brown-Eyes?”

Neal flushed. “You have no right to ask any such question,” he said, “and I shall not answer it. I will just say this to you. Do you suppose that Lord Dunseveric would accept me, a penniless man, the son of a Presbyterian minister, a member of a Church he despises, and connected with a party he hates—do you suppose he would accept me as a suitor for his daughter’s hand?”

“You have answered my question, though you said you would not answer it. You have told me that you love the girl. I have watched her smile at you, and seen her eyes while she talked to you, and I can tell you something more, something that perhaps you do not know—the girl loves you.”

Again Neal flushed. His uncle had put into words what he had never yet dared to think. He loved Una. His uncle had assured him of something else, something so glorious as to be incredible. Una loved him. Then he became conscious that Donald Ward’s eyes were on him—cold, impassive, unpitying; that Donald Ward was waiting till the throbs of joy and excitement calmed in him, waiting to speak again.

“Put the thought of the girl from you. She is not for you, nor you for her. Forget her. It will be better for you and for her. You shall have work to do soon. Work is for men. Seeing babies in brown eyes is only for boys.”

They left the path which skirted the tops of the cliffs, crossed a field or two, and joined the road which led to Micah Ward’s manse. The sound of the sea died away, though the smell of it and the feeling of its neighbourhood were still with them. The savage grandeur of ocean and cliff no longer oppressed their spirits. It seemed natural to talk of common things and to leave high themes behind them in the lonely places they had left. Donald Ward gazed with interest at the white-walled thatched cottages on the roadside. He commented on the disappearance of some homestead he remembered, or the building of a new one where none had been before. It was evident that, in spite of his twenty-five years’ absence, he cherished a clear and accurate recollection of the district he was passing through. He inquired after the families who had lived in the different houses, naming them. He learned how one or another had disappeared, how old men were gone, and sons reigned in their stead. He even supplied Neal with information now and then about some young man or girl who had gone to America.

They arrived at the manse. Neal led his uncle through the yard, meaning to enter as usual by the kitchen door. On the threshold the housekeeper met him.

“Is that you, Master Neal? You’re queer and late. You’ve had a brave time gadding with your fine friends and never thinking how you were leaving your old father to eat his dinner his lone. And who’s this you have with you? What sort of behaviour is this, to be coming here bringing a stranger with you to a decent, quiet house, and he maybe——”

“Whisht, now, Hannah. Will you hold your whisht (tongue?)?” said Neal. “It’s my uncle I have with me. You ought to be able to remember him.”

The old woman came forward to the place where Donald Ward stood, and peered at his face.

“Aye, I mind you well, Donald Ward. I mind you well. You hadna’ just too much of the grace of God about you when you went across the sea, and I’m doubting by the looks of you now that you’ve done more fighting than praying where you were.”

“Hannah Keady,” said Donald Ward.

“Hannah Macaulay,” said the housekeeper, “and forbye the old minister and Master Neal here, they call me Mistress Macaulay that have any talk with me. I’m married and widowed since you crossed the sea.”

“Mistress Hannah Macaulay,” said Donald, “you were a slip of a girl with a sharp tongue when I mind you first, and a woman with a sharp tongue when I said good-bye to you. You have lost your bonny looks and your shining red hair; you’ve lost a husband, so you tell me, but you haven’t lost your tongue.”

The old woman smiled. The compliment pleased her.

“Come in,” she said, “come in. The minister’ll be queer and glad to see you. You know that fine. But have done with your old work. We’ve no more call for Hearts of Oak boys, nor Hearts of Steel boys, nor for burning ricks, nor firing guns.”

She led the way through the kitchen, up a narrow flight of stone stairs, and opened the door of the room where the minister sat over his bodes.

“Here’s Master Neal home again,” she said, “and he’s brought your brother Donald Ward along with him.”

Micah Ward rose to his feet and met his brother with outstretched hands.

“Is it you, Donald? Is it you, indeed? I’ve been thinking long for you this many a time, my brother, and wearying for you. We want you, Donald, we need you sore, sore indeed.”

“Why, Micah,” said Donald, “you’ve grown into an old man.”

The contrast between the two brothers was striking, more striking than the likeness of their faces, though that was obvious. Micah was stooped and pallid. He walked feebly. His limbs were shrunken. His hair was thin and white. Donald stood upright, a well-knit, vigorous man. The point of his beard and the hair over his ears were touched with iron grey, but no one looking at him would have doubted his energy and capacity for physical endurance.

“Grey hairs are here and there upon us, and we know it not—Hosea, 7th and 9th,” said the minister. “But there’s fifteen years atween us, Donald. It makes a difference. Fifteen years age a man, but I’m supple and hearty yet.”

“Will I cook the salmon for your supper?” said the housekeeper. “You’ll not be contenting yourselves with the stirabout now that you have your brother back again with you.”

“Cook the salmon, Hannah; plenty of it, and some of the ham and the eggs. And, Neal, do you take the key of the cellar and get us a bottle of wine and the whisky that old Maconchy brought in from Rathlin last summer. It’s not often I take the like, Donald, but it is meet that we should make merry and be glad.”

Mistress Hannah Macaulay was a competent cook and housekeeper. It is noticeable that women with sharp tongues are generally more efficient than their gentler sisters. Solomon, who knew a good many things, seems also to have known this. He was of opinion that a peaceful dinner of herbs is better than a stalled ox and contention therewith. He knew that he could not have both. It is the shrew who succeeds in giving the males dependent on her stalled oxen and such like dainties to eat.

The caressing wife and the sweet-tempered cook accomplish no more than dinners of herbs, and generally even they are not particularly appetising. The fact is, that the management of domestic affairs is the most trying of all occupations. Cooking, washing, cleaning, and generally doing for men in a house means continuous irritation and worry. A woman, however sweet-natured originally, who is condemned to such work must either lose her temper over it, in which case she may cook stalled oxen, but will certainly serve them with sauce of contention, or she may give up the struggle and preserve her gentleness. Then she will accomplish no more than dinners of herbs, boiled cabbages, from which tepid water exudes, and dishes of pallid turnips, supposed to be mashed but full of lumps. Solomon preferred, or said he preferred, kisses and cauliflowers. On questions of taste there is no use disputing.

Mistress Hannah Macaulay’s salmon steaks came to the table with an appetising steam rising from their dish. Her slices of fried ham formed an attractive nest for the white-skinned poached eggs. She had plates of curly oatcake and powdery farles. She had yellow butter in saucers. She brought the porridge to table in well-scoured wooden bowls with horn spoons in them.

“The stirabout is good,” she said. “I thought you’d like to sup them before you ate the meat.”

Neal poured the wine into an old cut-glass decanter, and set Maconchy’s bottle of whisky, distilled, no doubt, by Maconchy himself among the Rathlin Hills, beside his father’s plate.

Micah Ward said a long grace, in which he thanked the Almighty for the fish, the ham, the eggs, the porridge, and his brother’s return from America. As a kind of supplement, he added a prayer for the peace of his household, in which Hannah Macaulay, appropriately enough under the circumstances, was especially named.

After supper the two brothers drew their chairs to the fire. It was late in May, but the air was still chilly in the evenings. Hannah took down from the mantel-piece two well-polished brass candlesticks, fitted them with tall dipt candles, and set them on the table she had cleared of plates and dishes. Donald took a tobacco-box from his pocket, and filled a pipe.

“Neal,” said his father, “you may go to your own room and complete the transcription of the passages of Josephus which you left unfinished this morning.”

“Let the lad stay,” said Donald.

“Neal knows nothing of the matters about which we must talk, brother, nor do I think it well that he should know; not yet, at least.”

“Let the lad stay,” repeated Donald. “I’ve seen younger men than he is doing good work. Neal ought to be working, too. We cannot do anything without the young men.”

Micah Ward yielded to his brother.

“Draw your chair to the fire, Neal,” he said. “You may stay and listen to us.”

At first the talk was of old days. An hour went by. Donald filled his pipe more than once, and finished his tumbler of punch. Story followed story of the doings of the Hearts of Steel and Hearts of Oak. Donald, as a boy, had taken his part—and that a daring part—in the fierce struggle by which the northern tenant-farmers gained fuller security and a chance of prospering a whole century before their brethren in the south and west, with the aid of the English Parliament, won the same privileges. Then Donald, speaking oftener and smoking less, told of his own share in the American War of Independence. Neal, listening, was thrilled with the stories of unequal battles between citizen soldiers and trained troops. He glowed with excitement as he came to understand the indomitable courage which faced reverse after reverse and snatched complete victory in the end. Donald dwelt much on the part which Irishmen had taken in the struggle, especially on the work of Ulster men, Antrim men, men of the hard northern breed, of the Presbyterian faith.

“There’s no breaking our people, Micah; men of iron, men of steel.”

“Shall iron break the northern iron, and the steel?” quoted Micah Ward, and then, with that wonderful Puritan accuracy of reference to the Bible, gave chapter and verse for the words—Jeremiah the 15th and 12th.

“And the spirit’s not dead in you at home, is it, Micah? The breed is pure still.”

It was Micah’s turn to speak. Neal sat in astonishment while his father told of the wrongs which the northern Presbyterians and the southern Roman Catholics suffered. Never before had he heard his father speak with such passion and fierceness. There was a pause at last, and Donald rose to his feet. He re-filled his glass from the punch-bowl, raised it aloft, and said:—

“I give you a toast. Fill your glass, brother. No, that will not do. Fill it full, and fill a glass for Neal. Stand now. I will have this toast drunk standing. ‘Here’s to America and here’s to France, the pioneers of human liberty, and may Ireland soon be as they are now!’ ”

“Amen,” said Mica h Ward solemnly.

“Drink, Neal, drink. Drain your glass, boy. I will have it,” said Donald.

“The northern iron, the northern iron, and the steel,” muttered Micah.

Then the brothers drew their chairs closer together, and Micah, speaking low, as if he dreaded the presence of some unseen listener, began to tell of the plans of the United Irishmen. He mentioned the names of one leader and another; told how the Government, vigilant and alert, had already struck at the organisation; of the general dread of spies and informers. He entered into details; told how the cannon, once given by the Government to the Volunteers, were hidden in one place, how muskets were stored in another, how the smiths in every village were fashioning pike heads, how many men in each locality were sworn, how every male inhabitant of Rathlin Island had taken the oath. Donald interrupted him now and then with sharp questions. The talk went on and on. The tones of the speakers grew lower still. Neal lost much of what was said. His interest slackened. His eyes closed at last, and he fell fast asleep.

It was late, close on midnight, when his uncle shook him into consciousness again. The candles were burned down. The fire was out. The atmosphere of the room was heavy with tobacco smoke. The punch-bowl was empty, and the two bottles, empty also, stood beside it. It seemed to Neal that his uncle spoke thickly in bidding him good night, and walked unsteadily across the room. But Micah Ward’s voice was clear and his steps were firm. Only, as Neal thought, his eyes shone more brightly than usual, and he held himself upright. The stoop was gone from his shoulders, and the peering, peaked look from his eyes.