The Northern Iron Part 13

"Spoken like a gentleman," said Donald, grasping the outstretched hand. "Enough said, you have satisfied me that you meant no insult. A gentleman can do no more."

"I am not what they call a gentleman," said James Hope, "I am only a poor weaver with no claim to any such t.i.tle."

CHAPTER VII

At breakfast the next morning James Hope spoke again about Finlay.

"The man went home last night with Aeneas Moylin. I think that I ought to go to Donegore to-day and tell Aeneas of our suspicions. I had intended to go straight to Templepatrick, and I might have had your company so far, but it will certainly be better for me to go round by Donegore."

Donald Ward nodded.

"I shall not see Finlay himself," said Hope. "He was to leave early this morning for Belfast. You must ride fast to be there before him."

He paused. Then, after a moment's thought, he said:

"I should like to have Neal with me, if you can spare him, Donald Ward, if you do not object to riding alone."

"I am sure," said Donald, "that Neal will benefit much more by your company than mine. He can join me in Belfast this evening."

This was Donald's apology, his confession of contrition for the rough language of the night before; his confession that in James Hope he had met a man who was his superior.

"So be it," said Hope. "I shall not propose to you, Neal, that we ride and tie as the custom of the country is for travellers who have only one horse between them. You shall lead the horse, and so we shall be able to talk to each other."

Neal agreed to the plan gladly. He was greatly attracted by James Hope, and glad to spend some hours with him.

The girl came running into the room, her face flushed with excitement.

"Come, come," she cried, "the soldiers are riding down the street in their braw red coats. Oh, the bonny men and the bonny horses!"

The three travellers went to the door of the inn. Four companies of dragoons were pa.s.sing through the town at a trot. It was Neal's first view of any considerable body of troops. He stared at them, fascinated by the jingling and clattering of their accoutrements. These were very different from the yeomen he had seen at Dunseveric. Everything about them, the uniformity of their appearance, the condition of their arms and horses, the regularity of their march, expressed the fact that they were highly disciplined men. Donald Ward smiled grimly as he watched them.

"There are the men we've got to beat," he said. "Fine fellows, eh, Neal?

They look as if they could sweep you and me and Jemmy Hope here, and a crowd like us, out of their way; but I've seen men in those same pretty clothes glad enough to turn their backs on troops no better organised nor drilled than ours will be."

"Poor fellows!" said Hope "poor fellows! Paid to fight and die in quarrels which are not their own. To fight for their masters, that their masters may grow rich and great. And yet they are of the people, too. It is just starvation, or the fear of it, that led them to enlist."

"Where are they going now?" asked Neal.

"To Belfast," said Hope. "I heard that the garrison there was deemed insufficient and that a fresh regiment of dragoons had been ordered in from Derry."

"Look at them well, Neal," said Donald. "Look at them so that you'll know them when you next see them. You'll meet them again before long."

James Hope and Neal started on their walk soon after the dragoons had pa.s.sed. Just outside the town they turned aside to view the round tower, the most famous of the buildings of its kind in the north.

"None knows," said Hope, "who built these towers, or why, but it seems certain to me that they were built by men with lofty thoughts, by men who looked upward rather than to the earth. Some say that it was to other G.o.ds they looked up and not to the true G.o.d. What does it matter?

Their hearts, like their towers, rose clear of earthly hamperings and reached towards heaven."

He asked Neal many questions about his way of life and education, about the books he had read, and the periods of history he found specially interesting.

"I had no such opportunities when a boy," said Hope, "as you have had.

I am a self-educated man. I never had but fifteen months of schooling in my life. What little knowledge I have I gained with great difficulty."

This surprised Neal, for it seemed to him that he had never talked to anyone who possessed more of that sweetness and wide reasonableness of outlook upon life which ought to be the end of education. He tried to express something of what he felt, but Hope stopped him and turned the talk into other channels.

At Farranshane Hope bade him stand still and look at a farmhouse which stood a little back from the road.

"It was there," he said, "that William Orr lived. His widow and weans are there now. You know the story, Neal?"

"I know it; yes, I know the outlines of it. Do you tell it to me again."

Hope repeated the story, which in those days hardly needed telling among the Antrim peasants, of the man whose name had become a watchword; so that men, seeking to revive failing enthusiasms, said to each other--"Remember Orr." It was a pitiful tale; a man marked down as odious by a powerful faction, spied upon, informed against, tried by prejudiced judges, condemned on the word of false witnesses, hanged. The same tale might have been told of many another then, but William Orr came first on the list of such martyrs, and even now his name is not wholly forgotten.

They reached Donegore. Moylin's house--a comfortable, two-storeyed building, built of large blocks of stone--stood on the side of the steep hill, near the old church and the graveyard. Hope, bidding Neal wait for him on the roadside, entered the house. In about a quarter of an hour he returned.

"It is as I thought," he said. "Finlay left early this morning after arranging for a meeting of the United Irishmen here next week. Well, there is no more to be done for the present. I have warned Moylin to be careful. Come and let me show you the ancient fort from which the parish takes its name and the view from it."

"This," said Hope, when they stood at last on the top of the great rath, "is my Pisgah. From this I have looked many a time over the land. See, west, south, east of you, how it spreads, rich, beautiful, from the sh.o.r.es of Lough Neagh to the sh.o.r.es of Belfast Lough and the sea of Moyle. Here great men, warriors of the past, had their hill-top burial, and it may be fixed their fortress home. From this they looked over the country which they took and held by strength of arm and courage of soul.

Are we a meaner race, men of a poorer spirit? Shall we not enter in and possess the land in our turn? All over the world the voice of liberty is heard now, clear and strong, bidding the people a.s.sert themselves and claim right and justice. Are our ears alone deaf to the high call? Has the pursuit of riches dulled our souls? Is the clink of gold and silver so loud in our ears that we can hear nothing else?"

They descended the gra.s.sy sides of the old fort, walked down the steep lane from Moylin's house, and joined the road again. Turning to the right, they went under the shade of fine trees which reached their branches over the road from the demesne in which they grew.

"The big house in there," said Hope, "belongs to one of the landlord families of this county. It has been their's for generations. On the lawn in front of that house a company of Volunteers used to meet for drill. The owner of the house, the lord of the soil, was their captain.

In those days we had all Ireland united--the landlords, the merchants, and the farming people. Now it is not so. Our landlords won then what they wanted--freedom and power. They have ruled Ireland since 1782.

The merchants and manufacturers also won what they chiefly wanted--the opportunity of fair and free trade. They have grown rich, and are every year growing richer. They bid fair to make Ireland a great commercial nation--what she ought to be, the link between the Old World and the New. But both the landlords and the traders have been selfish. Having gained the object of their desires, they are unwilling to share either power or riches with the people. They have refused to consider reasonable measures of reform. They have goaded and harried us until----"

He ceased speaking and sighed.

"But," he went on, "they will not be able to keep either their power or their riches. In refusing to trust the people they are ensuring their own doom. They forget that there is a power greater than theirs--that England is continually on the watch to win back again her sovereignty over Ireland. Our upper cla.s.s and our middle cla.s.s are too jealous of their privileges to share them with us. They will give England the opportunity she wants. Then Ireland will be brought into the old subjection, and her advance towards prosperity will be checked again as it was checked before. She will become a country of haughty squireens--the most contemptible cla.s.s of all, men of blackened honour and broken faith, men proud, but with nothing to be proud of--and of ruined traders; a land of ill-cultivated fields and ruined mills; a nation crushed by her conqueror."

Neal listened attentively. It was curious that the fear to which James Hope gave expression was the very same which he had heard from Lord Dun-severic. Each dreaded England. Each saw that out of the turmoil of contemporary politics would come the restoration of the English power over Ireland. But Lord Dunseveric blamed the schemes of the United Irishmen. James Hope blamed the selfishness of the upper cla.s.ses.

Neal tried to explain to his companion what he understood of Lord Dunseveric's opinions.

James Hope broke in on him, interrupting him.

"But the people are slaves, actually slaves, not a whit better. Are nine-tenths of the people to be slaves to one-tenth? The thing is unendurable. Look at the Catholics in the south, men without representation, without power, without direct influence; men marked with a brand of inferiority because of their religion. Look at the men of our own faith here in the north. Our case is not wholly so bad, but it is bad enough. We have asked, pet.i.tioned, begged, implored, for the removal of our grievances. If we are men we must do more--we must strike for them. Else we confess ourselves unworthy of the freedom which we claim.

They alone are fit for liberty who dare to fight for liberty. Think of it, Neal Ward, think. It is we, the people, digging in the fields, toiling at the looms, it is we who make the riches, who win the good fruit from the hard ground, who weave the thread into the precious fabric. And we are denied a share in what we create. It is from us in the last resort that the power of the governing cla.s.ses comes. If we had not taken arms in our hands at their bidding, if we had not stood by them, no English Minister would ever have yielded to their demands, and given them the power which they enjoy. And they will not give us the smallest part of what we won for them. 'What inheritance have we in Judah? Now see to thine own house, David. To your tents, O Israel!'"

James Hope's voice rose. His eyes flashed. His whole face was enlightened with enthusiasm as he spoke. Neal listened, awed. Here was the devotion to the cause of suffering and oppressed men, the spirit which had produced revolution, which had begotten from the womb of humanity pure and n.o.ble men, which had, in the violence of its self-a.s.sertion, deluged cities with blood and defiled a great cause with dreadful deeds. He had no answer to make, and for a long while they walked in silence.

Reaching Templepatrick, Hope took Neal to the house of John Birnie, a hand-loom weaver, a cousin of his own. They were welcomed by the woman of the house and given a share of a meal which even to Neal, brought up as he had been without luxury in his father's manse, seemed poor and meagre. But no thought of the hardness of their fare seemed to trouble the mind of the weaver and his wife. Theirs was the kind of hospitality which disdains apology or pretence. They gave of their best. There was no more that they could do. Also, it was evident that the tickling of the palate with food, or the filling of the belly with delicate things was not a matter of much importance to these people. Living hard and toilsome lives, they had the constant companionship of lofty thoughts.

They felt as James Hope did, and spoke like him.

Neal lingered so long in the company of these new friends that it was far on in the afternoon when he started on his ride, and late in the evening when he arrived in the outskirts of Belfast. It was his first visit to the town, and he approached it with feelings of interest and curiosity. Riding down the long hill by which the road from Templepatrick approaches Greencastle on the way to the town, he was able to gaze over the waters of the lough which lay stretched beneath him on his left. In the Carrickfergus roads several ships lay at anchor, among them a frigate of the English navy. Pinnaces and small craft plied between them and the sh.o.r.e, or headed for the entrance of Belfast Harbour by the tortuous channel worn through mud and sand by the Lagan.

Below him, by the sea, were the handsome houses which the richer cla.s.s of merchants were already beginning to build for themselves on the sh.o.r.es of the lough. Between Carnmoney and Belfast he pa.s.sed the bleach greens of the linen weavers, where the long webs of the cloth, for which Belfast was afterwards to become famous, lay white or yellow on the gra.s.s. On his right rose the rugged sides of the Cave Hill. High above its rocks towered MacArt's fort, where Wolfe Tone, M'Cracken, Samuel Neilson, and his new friend, James Hope, with others, had sworn the oath of the United Irishmen. They had separated far from each other since the day of their swearing, but each in his own way--Tone among the intrigues of Continental politics, M'Cracken in Belfast, Neilson and Hope among the Antrim peasantry--had kept the oath and would keep it until the end.