The Northern Iron Part 1

The Northern Iron.

by George A. Birmingham.

TO FRANCIS JOSEPH BIGGER,

ARDRIGH, BELFAST.

_My Dear Bigger,_

_This story, as you have already guessed, is the fruit of a recent holiday spent in County Antrim. The writing of it has been a great pleasure, for almost every place mentioned in it recalls the goodness of the friends who received me and made my holiday a happy one. I think of kind people when I write of Dunseveric and Ballintoy--of hours spent in their company among the Runkerry cliffs, the sandhills, the Skerries, and of the morning on which I swam, like Neal and Una, into the Rock Pigeons' Cave, I remember a time--full of interest and delight--spent with you when I mention Donegore, Antrim, and Temple-Patrick. My mind dwells on an older, a very dear friend and relative, when I tell of Neal's visit to Belfast. And the book is more than the recollection of a summer holiday. I go back in it to my own country--to places familiar to me in boyhood as the mountains and bays of Mayo are now; to days very long ago, when I caught cuddings and lithe off the Black Rock or Rackle Roy and learned to swim in the Blue Pool at Port Ballintrae. Yet I know that I could not, for all that I remembered of my boyhood or learned during my holiday, have written this story without your help. You told me what I wanted to know, you corrected, patiently, my ma.n.u.script, and you have helped me to enter into the spirit of the time. For all this I owe you many thanks, and if I have succeeded in writing a story which interests my readers they, too, will owe you thanks._

_I have tried to be faithful to the facts of history and to represent the thoughts and feelings of the men who took part in the_

"Out, unhappy far off things And battles long ago,"

_of which I chose to write. Most of my characters are purely imaginary.

Of the men who really lived and acted in 1798 only one--James Hope--appears prominently in my story. In his case I have taken pains to understand what manner of man he was before I wrote of him, and I believe that, feeble though my presentation of his character may be, you will not find it actually untruthful._

_I am your friend,_

_GEORGE A. BIRMINGHAM._

THE NORTHERN IRON

CHAPTER I

The road which connects Portrush with Ballycastle skirts, so far as any road can and dare, the sea coast. Sometimes it is driven inland a mile or so by the impossibility of crossing tracts of sandhills. The mounds and hollows of these dunes are for ever shifting and changing. The loose sand is blown into new fantastic heights and valleys by the winter gales. No road could be built on such insecure foundation. Elsewhere the road shrinks back among the shelterless fields for fear of mighty cliffs by which this northern Antrim coast is defended from the Atlantic. No engineer in the eighteenth century, when the road was made, dared lay his metal close to the Causeway cliffs or the awful precipice of Pleaskin Head. Still, now and then, in places where there are no sandhills and the cliffs are not appalling, the road ventures, for a mile or two, to run within a few hundred yards of the sea, before it is swept, like a cord bent by the wind, further inland. Thus, after pa.s.sing the ruins of Dunseveric Castle, the traveller sees close beneath him the white limestone rocks and broad yellow stretch of Ballintoy Strand.

Here, when northerly gales are blowing, he may, if he is not swept off his feet, cling desperately to his garments and watch the great waves curl their feathered crests as they rush sh.o.r.ewards. He may listen, awestruck, to the ocean's roar of amazement when it batters in vain the hard north coast, the rocks and sand which defy even the strength of the Atlantic.

A quarter of a mile back from this piece of road there stood, in 1798, the meeting-house of the Presbyterians and their minister's manse.

The house stands on the site of a bare, shelterless hill. It is three storeys high--a narrow, gaunt building, grey walled, black-slated. Its only entrance is at the back, and on the sh.o.r.eward side. This house has disdained the shelter which might have been found further inland or among its fellow-houses in the street of Ballintoy. It faces due north, preferring an outlook upon the sea to the warmth and light of a southern aspect. It is bare of all architectural ornament. Its windows are few and small. The rooms within are gloomy, even in early summer. Its architect seems to have feared this gloominess, for he planned great bay windows for three rooms, one above the other. He built the bay. It juts out for the whole height of the house, breaking the flatness of the northern wall. But his heart failed him in the end. He dared not put such a window in the house. He walled up the whole flat front of the bay. Only in its sides did he place windows. Through these there is a side view of the sea and a side view of the main wall of the house. They are comparatively safe. The full force of the tempest does not strike them fair.

In one of the gloomy rooms on a bright morning in the middle of May sat the Reverend Micah Ward, the minister. The sun shone outside on the yellow sand, the green water, and the white rocks; but neither sun nor sea had tempted Micah Ward from his books. Great leather-covered folios lay at his elbow on the table. Before him were an open Hebrew Bible, a Septuagint with queer, contracted lettering, and an old yellow-leaved Vulgate. The subject of his studies was the Book of Amos, who was the ruggedest, the fiercest, and the most democratic of the Hebrew prophets.

Micah Ward's face was clean-shaved and marked with heavy lines. Thick, bushy brows hung over eyes which were keen and bright in spite of all his studying. Looking at his face, a man might judge him to be hard, narrow, strong--perhaps fanatical. Near the window:--one of the slanting windows through which it is tantalising to look--sat a young man, tall beyond the common, well knit, strong--Neal Ward, the minister's son. He had grown hardy in the keen sea air and firm of will under his father's rigid discipline. He had never known a mother's care, for Margaret Ward, a bright-faced woman, ill-mated, so they said, with the minister, never recovered strength after her son's birth. She lingered for a year, and then died. They laid her body in Templeastra Graveyard, near the sea. Over her grave her husband set a stone with an austerely-worded inscription to keep her name in memory:--"The burying-ground of Micah Ward. Margaret Neal, his wife, 1778." Such inscriptions are to be found in scores in the graveyards of Antrim. The hard, brave men who chose to mark thus the resting-places of their dead disdained parade of their affliction and their heart-break, and held their creed so firmly that they felt no need of any text to remind them of the resurrection of the dead.

Neal Ward, like his father, had books and papers before him, but his attention was not fixed on them. Now and then, with spasmodic energy, he copied a pa.s.sage from the page before him. Then, with a sigh, he laid his pen down and gazed out of the window. His father took no notice of the young man's want of application. No words pa.s.sed between the two.

Then suddenly the silence was broken by a cry from the field below the house--

"h.e.l.lo! Neal! Neal Ward! h.e.l.lo! Are you there?"

The young man started to his feet and made a step to the window.

Then turning, he looked at his father. The frown on Micah Ward's brow deepened slightly. Otherwise he made no sign of having heard the cry.

He went on writing in his careful, deliberate manner. The voice from outside reached the room again.

"Neal! Neal Ward! Come out. What right has a man to shut himself indoors on a day like this?"

Neal stood irresolute, looking at his father. At last he spoke.

"Can I go out, father? I have almost finished the transcription of the pa.s.sage which you set me."

Micah Ward laid down his pen, sprinkled sand on his paper, and looked up. He gazed steadily at his son. The young man's eyes dropped. He repeated his question in a voice that was nearly trembling.

"Can I go out, father?"

"Who is it calls you, Neal?"

"It is Maurice St. Clair."

"Maurice St. Clair," repeated Micah Ward. Then, with a note of deep scorn in his voice, "The Hon. Maurice St. Clair, the son of Lord Dun-severic. Are you to do his bidding, to run like a dog when he calls you?"

"He is my friend, father."

"Is he a fit friend for you? Have I not told you that his people and our people are enemies the one to the other? That the oppression wherewith they oppress us--but there. Go, since you want to go. You do not understand as yet. Some day you will understand."

Neal left the room without haste, closing the door quietly. Once free of his father's presence he seized a cap and ran from the house. Half-way between him and the high road, knee deep in meadow gra.s.s, stood Maurice St. Clair.

"Come along, come along quick," he shouted. "I had nearly given up hope of getting you out. We're off for a day's fishing to Rackle Roy. We'll bag a pigeon or two at the mouth of the cave before we land. Brown-Eyes is down on the road waiting for us with rods and guns. We've all day before us. My lord is off to Ballymoney, and can't be back till supper-time."

"What takes Lord Dunseveric to Ballymoney to-day?" asked Neal. "There's no magistrates' meeting, is there?"

"No. He's gone to meet our aunt, Madame de Tourneville. She's been coming these five years, ever since she ran away from Paris at the time of the Terror; but it's only now she has succeeded in arriving."

Together the two young men crossed the field and vaulted the wall which separated the manse land from the road. The girl whom her brother called Brown-Eyes waited for them. The name suited her well, and came naturally from Maurice. He was tall and fair, yellow-haired, blue-eyed, large limbed, a fine type of Antrim Irishman, the heir of the form and face of generations of St. Clairs of Dunseveric. The girl, Una St. Clair, belonged to a different race--came of her mother's people. She was small, brown-skinned, brown-eyed, dark-haired. She grew as the years went on more and more like what her mother had been. Lord Dunseveric, watching his daughter pa.s.s from childhood to womanhood, saw in her the very image of Marie Dillon, the French-Irish girl who had won his heart a quarter of a century before in Paris.

"Take the guns, Neal. Here, Brown-Eyes, give me the rods and the basket.

There's no need for you to break your little back carrying them."

"Why should I when I've two big men to carry them for me? Indeed, I'm not sure but one of you ought to carry me, too. You're big enough and strong enough."

She smiled gaily at Neal as he shouldered the guns. They had built sand castles together when they were little children, and tempted the waves to chase them up the sand, flying barefoot from the pursuing lip of foam. They had climbed and fallen, explored rocky bays, penetrated to the depths of caves as they grew older. Always Una St. Clair had queened it over the boys, teased them, petted them, scolded them. Now, grown to womanhood, she discovered new powers in herself which made Neal at least more than ever her slave.

They reached the little bay where the boat lay pulled up among the rocks. Maurice and Neal lifted her stern on to a roller and dragged her towards the sea. Una, running before them, laid other rollers on the pathway of slippery rock till the boat floated. Then she climbed the gunwale and settled herself on the stern seat among the rods and guns.

The two young men shoved off into deep water, springing into the boat with dripping feet as she slid out clear of the sh.o.r.e. They placed the heavy oars between the wooden thole pins and steadied the boat while Una shipped the rudder. The wind was off sh.o.r.e and the sea, save for the long heave of the Atlantic, was still. The brown sail was hoisted and stretched with the sprit. Then, sailing and rowing, they swept past Carrighdubh, the Black Rock, which guarded the entrance of the little bay, and pa.s.sed into the shadow of the mighty cliffs.

A silence fell on them. The laughter and gay talk ceased. The sense of holiday joyfulness was overwhelmed by a vague awe of the ocean's greatness, the oppression of its strength, and the black towering rocks which hung over the boat, casting a gloom across the sea. The feeling of this solemnity abides through life with the men and women who have been bred as children on this north Antrim coast. If they live their lives out among its rugged harbours and stern ways they become, as the fishermen are, people of slow thoughts, long memories, and simple outlook upon life. The fear of the Lord is over their lives. If they wander elsewhere, making homes for themselves among the southern or western Irish, or, further still, to England or America, they may learn to be in appearance as other men are--may lose the harsh northern intonation from their talk, but down in the bottom of their hearts will be an awful affection for their sea, which is like no other sea, and the dark overwhelming cliffs whose shadow never wholly leaves their souls.

In times of stress and hours of bitterness they will fall back upon the stark, rigid strength of those who, seeing the mightiest of His works, have learned to fear the Lord.

The boat lay off the entrance of the Pigeon Cave. The sportsman's sense awoke in Maurice. He gave a brief order to Neal, laid his oar across the boat, stood up and took in the sprit, letting the sail hang in loose folds. He unstepped the mast and sat down again.

"You may unship the rudder, Brown-Eyes, You had better leave the boat to Neal and me to bring up to the cave. Pa.s.s the gun forward to me and the powder horn."

He loaded, ramming the charge down and pressing down the wad. Neal and the girl sat silent. The solemn enchantment of the scene was on them still. Then the two men took the oars again. Very cautiously they rowed along the narrow channel which led to the opening of the cave. The rocks lay low at first on each side of them; brown tangles of weed swayed slowly to and fro with the onward sweep and eddy of the ocean swell.

Then, as the boat advanced, the rocks rose higher on each side, sheer shining walls, whose reflection made the clear water almost black.

The huge arch of the cave's entrance faced them. Behind was the dark channel, and beyond it the sunlight on the sea, before them the impenetrable gloom of the cave. The noise of the water dropping from its roof into the sea beneath struck their ears sharply. The hollow roar of the sea far off in the utmost recesses of the cave came to them. The girl leaned forward from her seat and laid her hand on Neal's arm. He looked at her. Her eyes, the homes of laughter and quick inconsequences, were wide with dread. Neal knew what she felt. It was not fear of any definite danger or any evil actually threatening.