The voyage came to one, at any rate; and on a beautiful summer morning, the keel of the Grace Dieu at last grated upon the shingle of Ulster. Half-a-dozen of the crew jumped out into the surf, and twice as many came to help from the land. The great boat was dragged on shore by the help of ropes, a ladder set against her side, and Roger carefully carried ashore by a squire. Lawrence was left to climb down as he best could. Both reached the ground in safety, and found themselves in presence of a crowd of officers and retainers in the Earl of Ulster's livery; from among whom in a moment the Earl himself came forward, and gave a warm fatherly welcome to his little son. After mutual greetings had been sufficiently exchanged between old residents and new-comers, the Earl mounted his horse, a superb bay caparisoned with a scarlet saddle-cloth, and Roger having been lifted on a white pony beside him, they rode away to the Castle of Carrickfergus.
Ulster was in the fourteenth century, as it still is in the nineteenth, in a much more settled, and to English eyes a more civilised condition, than the Milesian parts of Ireland: but even there, that hatred of rent which seems characteristic of the Irish race, flourished quite as luxuriantly as now. Fifty years before this date, Maud of Lancaster, the girl-widow of the murdered Earl of Ulster, and great-grandmother of little Roger, had been constrained to address piteous appeals to King Edward III. for his charity, on the ground that while nominally possessed of large property, she had really nothing to live upon, since her Irish tenants would not pay their rents.
The English mind, which is apt to pride itself upon its steady-going, law-abiding tendencies, was much exercised with this Irish peculiarity, which it could not understand at all. Why a man should not pay rent for land which the law affirmed was not his own, and what possible objection he could have to doing so beyond a wish to keep his money in his pocket, was wholly unintelligible to the Saxon mind, which never comprehended that passionate love for the soil, that blind clinging to the homestead, which are characteristic of the Celt. Those who have those qualities, among our now mixed race, whatever their known pedigree be, may rest assured that Celtic blood—whether British, Gaelic, or Erse—has entered their veins from some quarter.
The Irish, on their part, were for ever looking back to that day when they were lords of the soil, before the foot of the stranger had ever pressed the turf of the Green Isle. It was the land which they yearned to emancipate rather than themselves. In Celtic eyes a monarch is king of the land, and the people who dwell on it are merely adventitious coincidences: in Saxon eyes he is king of the people, and the land is simply the piece of matter which holds the people in obedience to the law of gravitation. The latter must necessarily be an emigrating and colonising race: the former as certainly, by the very nature of things, must feel subjection to a foreign nation an intolerable yoke, and exile one of the bitterest penalties that can be visited on man. How are these two types of mind ever to understand each other?
It has been well said that "there is not only one Mediator between God and man, but also one Mediator between man and man, the Man Christ Jesus." Never, as Man, was a truer patriot, and yet never was a more thorough cosmopolitan, than He whose eyes as God are always upon the Land of Israel, and who hath loved Zion. Can we not all learn of Him, and bear with each other till the day comes when we shall see eye to eye—when there shall be one nation upon the mountains of Israel, and one King over all the earth,—one flock, and one Shepherd?
CHAPTER III.
CAST ON THE WORLD.
"But He who feeds the ravens young
Lets naething pass He disna see,
He'll some time judge o' richt and wrang,
And aye provide for you and me."
—JAMES HOGG.
"Would it please your good Lordship to stand still but one minute?"
"No, Wenteline, it wouldn't." And little Roger twisted himself out of the hands which were vainly endeavouring to smoothe down his vest of violet velvet embroidered in silver, and to fasten it round the waist with a richly-chased silver belt.