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THE RED HAND
OF ULSTER
BY
G. A. BIRMINGHAM
AUTHOR OF "SPANISH GOLD," "THE MAJOR'S NIECE,"
"PRISCILLA'S SPIES," ETC.
HODDER & STOUGHTON
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
Copyright, 1912,
By George H. Doran Company
UNIFORM EDITION _of the_ WORKS _of_
G. A. BIRMINGHAM
_Each, net $1.20_
LALAGE'S LOVERS
SPANISH GOLD
THE SEARCH PARTY
THE SIMPKINS PLOT
THE MAJOR'S NIECE
PRISCILLA'S SPIES
THE RED HAND
OF ULSTER
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
NEW YORK
PREFATORY NOTE
In a book of this kind some of the characters are necessarily placed
in the positions occupied by living men; but no character is in any
way copied from life, and no character must be taken as representing
any real person. Nor must the opinions of Lord Kilmore of Errigal, the
imaginary narrator of the tale, be regarded as those of the Author.
G. A. B.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
BY
LORD KILMORE OF ERRIGAL
The events recorded in this chapter and the next did not fall under my
own observation. I derived my knowledge of them from various sources,
chiefly from conversations with Bob Power, who had, as will appear,
first-hand knowledge. In the third chapter I begin my own personal
narrative of the events which led up to the final struggle of Ulster
against Home Rule and of the struggle itself. Accidents of one kind or
another, the accidents of the situation of Kilmore Castle, the
accident of Bob Power's connection with my daughter Marion, the
accidents of my social position and personal tastes, have placed me in
a position to give a very full account of what actually happened. The
first two chapters of this book will therefore be written in the
impersonal manner of the ordinary history; I myself occupying the
position of unseen spectator. The rest of the book is largely founded
upon the diary which I actually kept.
THE RED HAND OF ULSTER
CHAPTER I
It was in 1908 that Joseph Peterson Conroy burst upon London in the
full magnificence of his astounding wealth. English society was, and
had been for many years, accustomed to the irruption of millionaires,
American or South African. Our aristocracy has learnt to pay these
potentates the respect which is their due. Well-born men and women
trot along Park Lane in obedience to the hooting calls of motor horns.
No one considers himself degraded by grovelling before a plutocrat.
It has been for some time difficult to startle London by a display of
mere wealth. Men respect more than ever fortunes which are reckoned in
millions, though they have become too common to amaze. But Joseph
Peterson Conroy, when he came, excited a great deal of interest. In
the first place his income was enormous, larger, it was said, than the
income of any other living man. In the next place he spent it very
splendidly. There were no entertainments given in London during the
years 1909, 1910, and 1911, equal in extravagance to those which
Conroy gave. He outdid the "freak dinners" of New York. He invented
freak dinners of his own. His horses--animals which he bought at
enormous prices--won the great races. His yachts flew the white
ensign of the Royal Yacht Squadron. His gifts to fashionable charities
were princely. English society fell at his feet and worshipped him.
The most exclusive clubs were honoured by his desire of membership.
Women whose fathers and husbands bore famous names were proud to boast
of his friendship.
It cannot be said that Conroy abused either his position or his
opportunities. He had won his great wealth honestly--that is to say
without robbing any one except other robbers, and only robbing them in
ways permitted by American law. He used what he had won honourably
enough. He neither bought the favours of the women who thronged his
entertainments; nor degraded, more than was necessary, the men who
sought benefits from him. For a time, for nearly four years, he
thoroughly enjoyed himself, exulting with boyish delight in his own
splendour. Then he began to get restless. The things he did, the
people he knew, ceased to interest him. It was early in 1911 that
the crisis came; and before the season of that year was over Conroy
had disappeared from London. His name still appeared occasionally
in the columns which the newspapers devote to fashionable intelligence.
But the house in Park Lane--the scene of many magnificent
entertainments--was sold. The dinner parties, balls and card parties
ceased; and Conroy entered upon what must have been the most exciting
period of his life.
Bob Power--no one ever called him Robert--belonged to an old and
respected Irish family, being a younger son of General Power of
Kilfenora. He was educated at Harrow and afterwards at Trinity
College. He was called to the Irish bar and might have achieved in
time the comfortable mediocrity of a County Court judgeship if he had
not become Conroy's private secretary. The post was secured for him by
an uncle who had known Conroy in New York in the days before he became
a millionaire, while it was still possible for an ordinary man to do
him a favour. Bob accepted the post because everybody said he would be
a fool to refuse it. He did not much like writing letters. The making
out of schemes for the arrangements of Conroy's guests at the more
formal dinner parties worried him. The general supervision of the
upper servants was no delight to him. But he did all these things
fairly well, and his unfailing good spirits carried him safely through
periods of very tiresome duty. He became, in spite of the twenty-five
years' difference of age between him and his patron, the intimate
friend of Joseph Peterson Conroy.
It was to Bob that Conroy confided the fact that he was tired of the
life of a leader of English society. The two men were sitting together
in the smoking room at one o'clock in the morning after one of
Conroy's most magnificent entertainments.
"I'm damned well sick of all this," said Conroy suddenly.
"So am I," said Bob.
Bob Power was a man of adventurous disposition. He had a reputation in
Connacht as a singularly bold rider to hounds. The story of his
singlehanded cruise round Ireland in a ten tonner will be told among
yachtsmen until his son does something more extravagantly idiotic.
The London season always bored him. The atmosphere of Conroy's house
in Park Lane stifled him.
"Is there any one thing left in this rotten old world," said Conroy,
"that's worth doing?"
In Bob's opinion there were several things very well worth doing. He
suggested one of them at once.
"Let's get out the _Finola_," he said, "and go for a cruise. We've
never done the South Sea Islands."
The _Finola_ was the largest of Conroy's yachts, a handsome vessel of
something over a thousand tons.
"Cruising in the _Finola_," said Conroy, "is no earthly good to me.
What I want is something that will put me into a nervous sweat, the
same as I was when I was up against Ikenstein and the railway bosses.
My nerves were like damned fiddle strings for a fortnight when I
didn't know whether I was going to come out a pauper or the owner of
the biggest pile mortal man ever handled."
Bob knew nothing of Ikenstein or the methods by which the pile had
been wrested from him and his companions, but he did know the
sensations which Conroy described. He, himself, arrived at them by
hanging on to a sea anchor in a gale of wind off the Galway coast, or
pushing a vicious horse at a nasty jump. Nervous sweat, stretched
nerves and complete uncertainty about the immediate future afford the
same delight however you get at them. He sympathized with Conroy.
"You might fit out a ship or two and try exploring round the South
Pole," Bob said. "They've got the thing itself of course, but there
must be lots of places still undiscovered in the neighbourhood. I
should think that hummocking along over the ice floes in a dog sledge
must be pretty thrilling."
Conroy sighed.
"I'm too fat," he said, "and I'm too darned soft. The kind of life
I've led for the last four years isn't good training for camping out
on icebergs and feeding on whale's blubber."
Bob smiled. Conroy was a very fat man. A camping party on an iceberg
would be likely to end in some whale eating his blubber.
"I didn't mean you to go yourself," said Bob.
"Oh! I see. I'm to fit out the expedition and you are to go in
command. I don't quite see where the fun would come in for me. It
wouldn't excite me any to hear of your shooting Esquimaux and
penguins. I shouldn't care enough whether you lived or were froze to
get any excitement out of a show of that kind."
"We'd call it 'The Joseph P. Conroy Expedition,'" said Bob; "and the
newspapers--"
"Thanks. But I'm pretty well fed up with newspaper tosh. The press has
boosted me ever since I landed in this country, and I'd just as soon
they stopped now as started fresh."
Bob relinquished the idea of a Polar expedition with a sigh.
It was Conroy himself who made the next suggestion.
"If politics weren't such a rotten game--"
Bob did not feel attracted to political life; but he was loyal to his
patron.
"Clithering," he said, "was talking to me to-night. You know the man I
mean, Sir Samuel Clithering. He's not in the Cabinet, but he's what
I'd call a pretty intimate hanger on; does odd jobs for the Prime
Minister. He said the interest of political life was absorbing."
"I shouldn't care for it," said Conroy. "After all, what would it be
worth to me? There's nothing for me to gain, and I don't see how I
could lose anything. It would be like playing bridge for counters.
They might make me a lord, of course. A title is about the only thing
I haven't got, but then I don't want it."
"I quite agree with you," said Bob. "I merely mentioned politics
because Clithering said--"
"Besides," said Conroy, "it wouldn't be my politics. England isn't my
country."
"It would be rather exciting," said Bob, "to run a revolution
somewhere. There are lots of small states, in the Balkans, you know,
which could be turned inside out and upside down by a man with the
amount of money you have."
"There's something in that notion," said Conroy. "Get a map, will
you?"
Bob Power did not want to go wandering round the house at half-past
one o'clock in the morning looking for a map of the Balkan States. It
seemed to him that the idea--the financing of a revolution was of
course a joke--might be worked out with reference to some country
nearer at hand, the geographical conditions of which would be
sufficiently well known without the aid of a map.
"Why not try Ireland?" he said.
Then a very curious thing happened. Conroy's appearance, not merely
his expression but his actual features seemed to change. Instead of
the shrewd face of a successful American financier Bob Power saw the
face of an Irish peasant. He was perfectly familiar with the type. It
was one which he had known all his life. He knew it at its best,
expressive of lofty idealisms and fantastic dreams of things beyond
this world's experience. He knew it at its worst too, when narrow
cunning and unquenchable bitterness transform it. The change passed
over Conroy's face and then quickly passed away again.
"By God!" said Conroy, "it's a great notion. To buck against the
British Lion!"
Bob remembered the things which he had heard and half heeded about
Conroy's ancestry. In 1850 another Conroy, a broken peasant, the
victim of evil fate and gross injustice, had left Ireland in an
emigrant ship with a ragged wife and four half starved children
clinging to him, with an unquenchable hatred of England in his heart.
The hate, it appeared, had lived on in his son, had broken out again
in a grandson, dominating the cynical cosmopolitanism of the financial
magnate. Bob was vaguely uneasy. He did not like the expression he had
seen on Conroy's face. He did not like the tone in which he spoke. But
it was obviously absurd to suppose that any one could take seriously
the idea of financing an Irish revolution.
Then Conroy began to talk about Ireland. He knew, it appeared, a great
deal about the history of the country up to a certain point. He had a
traditional knowledge of the horrors of the famine period. He was
intimately acquainted with the details of the Fenian movement. Either
he or his father had been a member of the Clan na Gael. He understood
the Parnell struggle for Home Rule. But with the fall of Parnell his
knowledge stopped abruptly. Of all that happened after that he knew
nothing. He supposed that the later Irish leaders had inherited the
traditions of Mitchel, O'Leary, Davitt and the others. Bob laughed at
him.
"If you're thinking of buying guns for the Nationalists," he said,
"you may save your money. They wouldn't use them if they had arsenals
full. They're quite the most loyal men there are nowadays. Why
wouldn't they? They've got most of what they want and Clithering told
me the Home Rule Bill was going to knit their hearts to the Empire.
Awful rot, of course, but his very words."
"What do you mean?" said Conroy.
Bob laughed again. He had all the contempt common in his class for
those of his fellow-countrymen who professed to be Nationalists. But
he had rather more intelligence than most Irish gentlemen. He quite
realized the absurdity of supposing that the Irish Parliamentary party
consisted of men who had in them the makings of rebels.
"Read their speeches," he said. "Since this talk of Home Rule began
they've been cracking up the glories of the British Empire like--like
the Primrose League."
"To-morrow morning," said Conroy, "you'll fetch me along all the books
and pamphlets you can lay hands on dealing with the present state of
the Irish question."
"I want a small cart," said Bob.
"Get a four-horse waggon, if you like," said Conroy.