Neal Ward was awakened next morning by the noise which Peg Macllrea made sweeping and tidying the room where he slept. He lay for a few minutes watching the girl. Her red hair was coiled up now in a neat roll at the back of her head. Her freckled face was clean, and had apparently escaped bruising in her conflict with the dragoon. She wore a short grey skirt of woollen homespun. The sleeves of her bodice were rolled up, and displayed a pair of muscular red arms. The girl was more than commonly tall, and anyone listening to her heavy footfall, and noting her thick figure and broad shoulders, would have understood that she was well able to carry a young man, even of Neal’s height, up a flight of stairs. The dragoon might easily have come to the worst in single combat with such a maiden if he had not obtained an advantage over her at the start by twisting her hair round his hand.

It was not very long before she noticed that Neal was awake. She came over to him smiling.

“You’ve had a brave sleep,” she said. “It’s nigh on eleven o’clock. The master and Mr. Ward are out this twa hours. They bid me not stir you. I was just readying up the room a bit, and I went about it as mim as a mouse.”

“I’m thinking,” said Neal, “that I’ll be getting up now.”

“‘Deed, then, and you’ll no. The last word the master said was just that you were to lie in the day. I’m to give you tea and toasted bread, and an egg if you fancy it.”

“But,” said Neal, “I can’t lie here in bed all day.”

“Whisht, now, whisht. Be good and I’ll get you them twa graven images the master’s so set on and let you glower at them. Maybe you never seen the like.”

She spoke precisely as if she had a sick child to humour; as if she were the nurse in charge, determined at any sacrifice to keep the peevish little one from crying. She crossed the room to a book-case and took down two bronze busts. With the utmost care she carried them over and laid them on the bed in front of Neal.

“The master’s one of them that goes neither to church nor mass nor meeting,” she said. “If ever he says his prayers at all, at all, it’s to them twa graven images he says them, and the dear knows they’re no so eye-sweet.”

She left the room, well satisfied apparently that she had provided her patient with playthings which would keep him good till she returned with his breakfast. Neal took up the busts and examined them. He would not have known whose faces were represented had not an inscription on the pedestal of each informed him. “Voltaire,” he read on one, “Rousseau” on the other. These were strange household gods for a Belfast innkeeper to revere. Neal, gazing at them, slowly grasped their significance. He had heard talk of French ideas, had seen his father shake his head over the works of certain philosophers. He knew that there was an intellectual freedom claimed by many of those who were most enthusiastic in the cause of political reform. He had not previously met anyone who was likely to accept the teaching of either Voltaire or Rousseau. His eyes wandered from the busts to the book-case on which they had stood. It was well filled, crammed with books. Neal could see them standing in close rows, books of all sizes and thicknesses, but he could not read the names on their backs. Peg Macllrea returned with his breakfast on a wooden tray. She put it down in front of him and then set herself to entertain him while he ate.

“Thon was a brave coup you gave the soger in the street,” she said. “You gripped him fine, the ugly devil. But you did na hurt him much. He was up and off when they got us dragged from him, as hard as ever he could lift a foot. You’ll be fond of fighting?”

“So far,” said Neal, “I have generally got the worst of it when I have fought.”

“Ay, you would. Your way of fighting is no just the canniest, but I like you no the worse for it. You might have got off without thon bloody clout on the top of your head if ye’d just clodded stones and then run like the rest of them. But that’s no your way of fightin’. Did ye ever fight afore?”

“Just two nights ago,” said Neal, “and I got the scrape on the side of my face then.”

“And was it for a lassie you were fightin’ thon time? I see well by the face of you that it was. And she liked you for it. Did she no? She’d be a quare one that didna. Did she give you a kiss to make the scrab on your face better? I wouldna think twice about giving you one myself only you wouldn’t have kisses from the likes of me. Be quiet now, and sup up your tea. I willna have you offering to slabber ower my hand if that’s what you’re after.”

Neal, who had felt himself goaded to some act of gallantry, returned sheepishly to his tea and toast.

“You’re no a Belfast boy?” said Peg.

“No,” said Neal, “I’m from Dunseveric, right away in the north of the county.”

“Ay, are you? Do you mind the old rhyme—

Maybe your lassie, the one that kissed you, was out of the County Down?”

“She was not,” said Neal, unguardedly.

Peg Macllrea laughed with delight and clapped her hands.

“I knew rightly there was a lassie, and that she kissed you. Now you’ve tellt me yourself. But I willna split on you, nor I willna let on that you tellt on her. But I hope she’s bonny, though she does not come from the County Down.”

Neal grew angry. It did not seem fitting that this red-haired, freckled servant, with her bold tongue and red arms, should make game of Una St. Clair’s kisses. They were sacred things in his memory.

“Now you’re getting vexed,” she said. “You’re as cross as twa sticks. I can see it in your eyes. Well, I’ve more to do than to be coaxing you.”

She turned her back on him and began to sing—

“Peg,” said Neal, “Peg Macllrea, don’t you be cross with me.”

she began again.

“Peg,” said Neal, “I’ve finished my tea, and I wish you’d turn round. Please do, please.”

She turned to him at last with a broad smile on her face.

“Is that the way you wheedled the poor lassie out of the kiss? But there now, I’ll no say a word more about her if it makes you sore. But I can’t sit here crackin’ all day. I’ve the dinner to get ready, and the master’ll be quare and angry if it’s no ready against he’s home.”

She picked up the tray as she spoke.

“Would you like me to leave you them twa graven images?” she said.

“I’d like you to take them away,” said Neal, “and then get me a book out of the case.”

“I will, surely. What sort of a book would you like? A big one or a wee one. There’s one here in a braw red cover with pictures of ships in it. Maybe it might content you.”

“Read me a few of their names,” said Neal, “and I’ll tell you which to bring.”

“Faith, if you wait for me to read you the names you’ll wait till the crack of doom. Nobody ever learned me readin’, writin’, or ‘rithmetic.”

“Bring me three or four,” said Neal, “and I’ll choose the one I like best.”

She deposited half a dozen volumes on the chair beside him and left the room. Neal took them up one by one. There was a volume of “Voltaire,” Tom Paine’s “Rights of Man,” “The VindiciÆ GallicÆ,” by Mackintosh, Godwin’s “Political Justice,” Montesquieu’s “Esprit des Lois,” and a volume of Burns’ poetry, not long out from a Belfast printer. Neal already knew Godwin’s works and the “Esprit des Lois.” They stood on his father’s bookshelves. He glanced at the pages of the others, and finally settled down to read Burns’ poetry. The Scottish dialect presents little difficulty to a man bred among County Antrim people. The love songs, with their extraordinary freshness and vivid emotion, delighted Neal. Like many lovers of poetry, he tasted the full pleasure of verse best when he read it aloud. One after another he declaimed the marvellous songs, returning again and again to one which seemed peculiarly suited to his circumstances—

He read the song aloud for the fourth time. As he uttered the last words he heard a laugh, and, looking up, saw his host, Felix Matier, standing at the door of the room.

“Well, Neal, good morrow to you. You’re well enough in body, to judge by your voice. But if that poem’s a measure of the state of your mind you’re sick at heart. Never mind Mary, man. There’s better stuff in Burns than that. He’s no bad poet, is Rabbie Burns. Listen to this now. Here’s one I’m fond of.”

He took the book out of Neal’s hand, and read him “Holy Willie’s Prayer.” His dry intonation’, his perfect rendering of the dialect of the poem, the sly twinkle of his eyes as he read, added exquisite malice to the satire.

“But maybe,” he said, “I oughtn’t to be reading the like of that to you that’s the son of the Manse, though nobody would think of Holy Willie and your father together. I’m not very fond of the clergy myself, Neal, either of your Church or another. I’m much of John Milton’s opinion that new presbyter is just old priest writ large, but if there’s one kind of minister that’s not so bad as the rest it’s the New Light men of the Ulster Synod, and your father’s one of the best of them. But here’s something now that Micah Ward would approve of. Just let me read you this. I’ll have time enough before your uncle comes in. He’s not a man of books, that uncle of yours, and I’d be ashamed if he caught me reading at this hour of the day. But listen to me now.”

He took up the volume of “Voltaire” and read—

Felix Matier’s manner of pronouncing French was somewhat painful to listen to. Voltaire would probably have failed to recognise his solitary lyric if he had heard it read by Mr. Matier. But if the poet had discovered that the verses were his own and had got over his shudder at a mangling of French sounds worse than the worst he can have heard at Potsdam from the courtiers of Frederick William, he would probably have been well enough satisfied with the spirit of the rendering. Mr. Matier, of the North Street, Belfast, was obviously a sincere worshipper of the dÉesse altiÈre, and would have been delighted to see her hands teintes du sang of the men who had torn down his sign the night before. Neal, though he could read French easily, did not understand a single word he heard. He took the book from his host to see what the poem was about. Mr. Matier did not seem the least vexed, although he understood what Neal was doing.

“The French are a great people,” he said. “Europe owes them all the ideas that are worth having. I’d be the last man to breathe a word against them, but I must say that it requires some sort of a twisted jaw to pronounce their language properly. I understand it all right when it’s printed, but as for Speaking it or following it when a Frenchman speaks it——”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“But it’s time I stopped moidering you with poetry. I hope you’re really feeling better. I hope Peg took good care of you, and brought you your breakfast.”

“Indeed she did. She took rather too good care of me. I thought one time she was going to kiss me.

“Did she make to do that? Well, now, just think of it! Isn’t she the brazen hussy? And I’m sure her breath reeked of onions or some such like.”

“Oh,” said Neal, “we didn’t get as far as that. Her breath may be roses for all I know.”

“You kept her at arm’s length. Serve her well right. I never heard of such impudence. But these red-haired ones are the devil. It’s the same with horses. I had a chestnut filly one time—a neat little tit in her way—but she’d kick the weathercock off the top of the church steeple whenever she was a bit fresh. Never trust anything red. A red dog will bite you, a red horse will kick you, a red wench will kiss you, besides being a damned unlucky thing to meet first thing in the morning, a red soldier will hang you. There’s only one good thing in the world that’s red, and that’s a red cap—the red cap of Liberty, Neal, and may we soon have all the red coats in the country cut up into such head-gear.”

It was fortunate for Neal that he found Felix Matier’s conversation amusing and Felix Matier’s books interesting. He had ample opportunity of enjoying them during the week which followed the dragoons’ riot. Donald Ward refused, as long as possible to allow him to get out of bed, and even when Neal was up and dressed, peremptorily forbade him to leave the house. He spoke weighty words about his experience of wounds, of frightful consequences which followed cuts on the head when the cold of the outer air got at them, of men who had died of lockjaw because they would not take care of scalp wounds, of burning eruptions which broke out on the unwary, of desperate fevers threatening life and reason.

Neal was puzzled. He had tumbled about among the rocks at Ballintoy a good deal during his boyhood, cutting and bruising most parts of his body. Even his head had not escaped. There was a deep scar under his hair which he had come by in the course of an attempt to enter a long fissure among the rocks of the Skerries, off Port-rush. But such wounds had troubled him very little. He had never made a fuss about them or taken any special precautions on account of them, neither knowing nor caring anything about the evils which may follow wounds, which do follow wounds, in pampered bodies. He could not understand why his uncle, who was certainly not otherwise given to morbid coddling, should insist upon such excessive care of a cut which was healing rapidly.

The fact was that Donald Ward was nervous about Neal, not at all on account of his cut head, which was nothing, but because Captain Twinely and his yeomen had returned to Belfast. It leaked out that the military authorities were not pleased with Captain Twinely. He had brought back three prisoners and the cannon, but he had not brought back Micah Ward, who was particularly wanted. Captain Twinely, angry at his cold reception, and furious at the hanging of his trooper, was anxious to revenge himself upon some one. Lord Dun-severic was too great a man to be attacked. The Government could not afford to interfere with his methods of executing justice in North Antrim. Captain Twinely was given a broad hint that he must hawk at lower game, and keep his mouth shut about the hanging of his trooper. There was no objection to the yeomen outraging women so long as they confined themselves to farmers’ wives, but an insult offered to Lord Dunseveric’s sister and daughter, under Lord Dunseveric’s own eyes, was a different matter. The less said the better about the hanging of the man who had distinguished himself by that exploit. Captain Twinely, growing savage at this second snub, and afraid lest perhaps he himself might be sacrificed when Lord Dunseveric’s story of his raid came to be told, sought to ingratiate himself with the authorities by offering them a fresh victim. He gave an exaggerated version of Neal Ward’s attack on the troopers outside the meeting-house, and drew an imaginary picture of the young man as a deep and dangerous conspirator. He even managed to shift the responsibility for the hanging of the trooper from Lord Dunseveric’s shoulders to Neal’s. He knew that Neal had left Dunseveric, and he assured Major Fox, the town major, that Neal was at that moment in Belfast arranging for the outbreak of the rebellion. Major Fox was worried by the complaints which respectable citizens were making about the dragoons’ riot. He was anxious to prove, if possible, that the soldiers’ conduct had been provoked by the violence of the United Irishmen. He produced the man whom Peg Macllrea and Neal had mangled and set him before the public as an object of pity, his wrist tied up and his head elaborately bandaged. A great idea flashed on him. He allowed it to be understood that he was on the track of a most dangerous rebel—a young man who had hanged a yeoman in Dunseveric and nearly murdered a dragoon in Belfast. In reality he was too busy just then with more important matters to make any real search for Neal Ward. But a week later he offered a reward of fifty pounds for such information as would lead to his apprehension.

But the rumours of Captain Twinely’s sayings were sufficient to frighten Donald Ward. He did not shrink from danger himself, and, had his own life been threatened, would have taken measures to protect himself without any feeling of panic, but his apprehension of peril for Neal was a different matter. He felt responsible for his nephew, and did not intend to allow him to be captured if caution could save him. Therefore, he insisted on Neal’s remaining indoors, and plied him with the most alarming accounts of the danger of his wound. He hoped in a few days to get Neal out of Belfast to the comparative safety of some farmhouse. He was particularly anxious that Finlay, who would certainly recognise the young man, should not see him.

News reached Belfast that the United Irishmen in Wexford were in arms and had taken the field against the English forces. The northern leaders became eager to move at once and to strike vigorously. Everything seemed to depend on their obtaining the command of Antrim and Down, and opening communications with the south. James Hope arrived in Belfast. Henry Joy M’Cracken was there. Henry Monro rode in every day from Lisburn. Meeting after meeting was held in M’Cracken’s house in Rosemary Lane, in Bigger’s house in the High Street, in Felix Matier’s shattered inn, or in Peggy Barclay’s. Robert Simms, the general of the northern United Irishmen, resigned his position. His heart failed him at the critical moment, and when pressed by braver men to take the field at once he hung back and gave up his command. He forgot his oath on MacArt’s Fort, where he stood side by side with Wolfe Tone. Henry Joy M’Cracken, a man of another spirit, was appointed in his place. With extreme rapidity and an insight into the conditions of the struggle, marvellous in a man with no military training, he laid his plans for simultaneous attacks upon a number of places in Down and Antrim.

The Government was not idle. The northern United Irishmen were the best organised and most formidable body to be dealt with. During the pause before the outbreak of hostilities spies went busily to and fro. Reports were carried to the authorities of every movement made, of almost every meeting held. Men were arrested, imprisoned, flogged in the streets of Belfast. Information was forced from prisoners under the lash. Parties of yeomen rode through the country burning, ravishing, and hanging as they went.

James Finlay earned his pay with the best of his kind, denouncing men whom he knew to be United Irishmen, and giving information about their whereabouts. He was settled in Bridge Street, and, strangely blind to the fact that he was no longer trusted, invited the leaders to confer with him, and allowed his house to be used as a store for ammunition. Donald Ward, grimly determined that this man should get his deserts, insisted that nothing should be said or done to alarm him.

“We can’t deal with him here,” he said. “Wait, wait till we get him down to Donegore next week. If we frighten him now he won’t go.”

Of all these doings Neal heard only vague rumours. Sometimes Peg Macllrea, crimson with horror and rage, came to him and told him of a flogging, sparing him no details of the brutality. Sometimes his uncle sat an hour with him and talked of the fight that was coming. He seemed neither impatient nor excited. He looked forward with calm satisfaction to the day when he would have a gun in his hand and an opportunity of shooting at the men who were harrying the country.

“We have a couple of brass cannons, Neal. They’re not much to boast of, but if they are properly served they will do some mischief. I have a little experience of artillery, though it wasn’t in my regular line of fighting. I think I’ll perhaps get charge of one of them.”

Felix Matier came often to see Neal. As things grew darker outside he became more and more extravagantly cheerful. His talk was all of liberty, of the dawn of the new era, of the breaking of old chains, and the rising of the peoples of the world in unconquerable might.

“We’re to do our share in the grand work, Neal Ward, you and me; we’ll have our hands in it in a day or two now.

“Ora, but fighting’s the work for a man after all. Here am I that have spent my life making up reckonings and seeing to drink and men’s dinners and the beds they were to sleep in. But I never was contented with such things, and the money I made didn’t content me a bit more. They taught me better, boy.” He put his hand on the pile of books which lay on the table in front of Neal. “They taught me that there was something better than making money and eating full and living soft, something in the world a man might fight for. Eh, but I wasn’t meant for an innkeeper—I was meant for a fighter.

James Hope also came to see Neal. His talk was very different from the flamboyant exultation of Felix Matier; very different also from Donald Ward’s cool delight in the prospect of battle. James Hope seemed to realise the awful gravity of taking up arms against established government. He alone understood the very small chance there was of victory for the United Irishmen. Yet Neal never for an instant doubted Hope’s courage. He felt that this man had argued out the whole matter with himself and thought deeply and prayed earnestly and had made up his mind.

“I do not think that we are sure to win, Neal, but I hope that our fighting will enable those coming after us to obtain by other means the liberty and security which will surely be withheld from them unless we fight. I do not say these things to every one, but I feel safe in saying them to you. You will not fear to die, if death is to be the end of it for us.”

Neal felt convinced that Hope himself would go calmly, steadfastly on if he were quite sure that the gallows waited for him. It was to Hope, more than to either of the others, that he complained about his confinement in Matier’s house.

“I cannot bear,” he said, “to be shut up here. I am not ill. The cut on my head is cured now. There must be some other reason for keeping me here. Am I not to be trusted? You say that you believe I will not shrink. Why keep me here as if you were all afraid of my turning coward or traitor?”

Hope parried these complaints as well as he could, telling Neal that a soldier’s first duty was obedience, that in good time he would be given something to do; that in the meanwhile he must show himself brave by being patient!

“It is harder,” he said, “to conquer yourself than to conquer your enemy.”

One day, when Neal had been a week in captivity, he broke out passionately to Hope—

“I cannot bear this any longer. I hear of you and my uncle and the others risking your lives. I hear of the brutality of the soldiers. I hear of great plans on foot. I claim my share of the danger that surrounds us. I understand now why you all combine to keep me here. You are afraid of my running risks. I claim, I claim as a right, that I be allowed to take the same risks as the rest.”

James Hope sat silent. His fingers played with the dark lock of hair which hung over his forehead. Neal knew the gesture well. It was common with Hope when he thought deeply and painfully. His fine dark eyes were fixed on Neal’s, and there was the same curiously gentle expression in them which had attracted Neal the first time he noticed it.

“I admit your claim,” said Hope, slowly, at last. “I shall speak to your uncle. To-morrow, I think I may promise this; to-morrow you shall come with me, and we shall do something which will be difficult, and I think a little dangerous too.”