The Northern Iron Part 38

"Ah, but my happiness is not complete. There are two things I want yet.

I want my father to come out with me, and I want you, too, my friend."

"And will your father not go? I heard that they had released him at last from the prison in Scotland, whew they kept him since the year of the break at Antrim. He's home again."

"Ay, he's home, and it's little cause he has to stay here. They have put a new minister in his place. The Synod, the conscienceless villains, declared it vacant. Castlereagh, through his satellite Black, has corrupted them, too. He'll preach no more in the old meeting-house, nor sit over his bodes in the old manse. He's at the Widow Maclure's now, the woman whose husband was hanged. He'll not want his bit while I've money in my pocket. But I'd like to bring him with me, to give him a better home."

"And will he not go?"

"He will not. He says he's too old to go to a new land now; but you'll help me to persuade him. I think, maybe, if you'd come with me that he'd come, too. And you will come, won't you?"

Hope shook his head.

"Don't shake your head at me that way, James Hope. You don't know what you're refusing. I can give you work to do out there, and money to earn, and a fine house to live in. It's a good land, so it is; it's a land of liberty. We've done with the tyrannies of this worn-out old world. A man may speak his mind out there, and think his own thoughts and go his own way. We doff our hats and make our bows to no man living, only to him who shows himself by fine deeds to be our better. It's the land for you and the land for me, and the land for every man that loves freedom. Will you not come?"

They reached the door of the Maclures' house and entered. A bright fine burned on the hearth. The Widow Maclure was busy spreading a white cloth on the table. Her eldest girl, a child of twelve years old, stood near at hand with a pile of wooden porridge bowls in her arms. The two other children, holding by their mother's skirts, followed, smiled on and chidden as they impeded her work, and babbled questions about this or that. Beside the fire, in the chair that had once belonged to the master of the house, sat Micah Ward. He looked very old now and infirm. The months in a prison hulk in Belfast Lough and the long weariness of his confinement in bleak Fort George had set their mark upon him. On his knees lay a Greek lexicon, but he was pursuing no word through its pages. It was open at the fly-leaf inside the cover. He was reading lovingly for the hundredth time an inscription written there--

"This book was given to Rev. Micah Ward by his fellow-prisoners in Fort George, in witness of their grat.i.tude to him for his ministrations during their captivity, and as a token of their admiration for his fort.i.tude, his patience, and his unfailing charity."

There followed a list of twenty names. Four of them belonged to men of the Roman Catholic faith, six of them were the names of Presbyterians, ten were of those who accepted the teaching of that other Church which, trammelled for centuries by connection with the State, hampered with riches secured to her by the bayonets of a foreign power, dragged down very often by officials placed over her by Englishmen, has yet in spite of all won glory. Out of her womb have come the men whose names shine brightest on the melancholy roll of the Irish patriots of the last two centuries. She has not cared to boast of them. She has hidden their names from her children as if they were a shame to her, but they are hers.

Thus far off in a desolate Scottish fortress, after the total failure of every plan, in the hour of Ireland's most hopeless degradation, the great dream which had fired the imagination of Tone and Neilson and the others, the dream of all Irishmen uniting in a common love of their country, a love which should transcend the differences of rival creeds, found a realisation. The witness, written in crabbed characters on the fly-leaf of a lexicon, lay on the knees of a broken old man in the cottage of a widow within earshot of the perpetual clamour of the bleak northern sea.

"Well, father," said Neal, "here I am back again. And here's Jemmy Hope, whom I picked up on the road. He's come to see you. He's going to persuade you to cross the sea with me. You and I and he together, and Hannah Macaulay, who's coming, too. Una will make you all welcome on her st.u.r.dy ship. It's her ship now. All that I have is her's."

Micah Ward looked at his son with a gentle, sad smile on his face. Then he turned to welcome his visitor.

"So you have come to see me, James Hope. It was good of you. Ah, man, there's not so many of us left now. Orr, they hanged him; M'Cracken, they hanged him; Monro, they hanged him; Porter, they hanged him. And many another, many another. And the rest are gone across the sea. You and I are left, with one here and there besides--a very small remnant, a cottage in a vineyard, a lodge in a garden of cuc.u.mbers, a besieged city."

"It's hard to tell," said Hope, "why they did not hang me, too. There were times when, only for my wife, who would have grieved after me, I could have found it in my heart to wish they would."

"Father," said Neal, "Hope is coming to America with me."

"Nay, lad, nay. I was born in Ireland, I've lived my life in Ireland, I'll die in Ireland when my time comes. Maybe before the end I'll find a chance to strike another blow for her."

"Doubtless," said Micah Ward, "such a blow will be stricken, but not in our time, James Hope. The fighting spirit is gone from us. The men are laid low or scattered or broken. The people speak about the 'break.'

They call it well. 'Shall iron break the northern iron and the steel?'

Yea, but iron hath broken us. It hath entered into our souls. And if one look unto the land, behold darkness and sorrow and the light is darkened in the heavens thereof."

"But there is another land," said Neal, "where the sun shines, where neither palaces of kings, nor haughty churches, nor the banners and cannon smoke of England's soldiers, nor yet the gallows, casting shadows over the green fields, and overtopping every village, can come between the people and the good light which the Lord G.o.d made for them. That's the land for you and me."

"For you, Neal," said Micah Ward, "and for the girl you love. But there is no other land except only this lost land for me and him."

He took Hope's hand and held it. Then, with his other hand, he drew his son down beside him. Neal knelt on the earthen floor of the cottage. He felt hands laid upon his head--his father's hands and James Hope's. The benediction came from both of them, though it was Micah Ward's voice which spoke the words--

"The Lord hear thee in the day of trouble, Neal; The name of the G.o.d of Jacob defend thee; Send thee help from the sanctuary, And strengthen thee out of Zion; Remember all thy offerings, And accept thy burnt sacrifice; Grant thee according to thine own heart, And fulfil all thy counsel."

THE END