The Northern Iron. George A. Birmingham
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