The Northern Iron. George A. Birmingham
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