The Wild Geese, Stanley John Weyman [best books to read for beginners txt] 📗

tendered his hilt to the girl, who took it with flaccid fingers. "I am in your hands now," he said, fixing his eyes on hers and endeavouring to convey his meaning to her. For surely, with such a face, she must have, with all her recklessness, some womanliness, some tenderness of feeling in her.

"D--n your impudence!" The McMurrough cried.

"A truce, a truce," the Bishop interposed. "We are all agreed that Colonel Sullivan knows too much to go free. He must be secured," he continued smoothly, "for his own sake. Will two of these gentlemen see him to his room, and see also that his servant is placed under guard in another room?"

"But," the Colonel objected, looking at Flavia, "my cousin will surely allow me to give----"

"She will be guided by us in this," the Bishop rejoined with asperity. "Let what I have said be done."

Flavia, very pale, holding the Colonel's sword as if it might sting her, did not speak. Colonel Sullivan, after a moment's hesitation, followed one of the O'Beirnes from the room, the other bringing up the rear.

When the door had closed upon them, Flavia's was not the only pale face in the room. The scene had brought home to more than one the fact that here was an end of peace and law, and a beginning of violence and rebellion. The Rubicon was passed. For good or for ill, they were committed to an enterprise fraught, it might be, with success and glory, fraught also, it might be, with obloquy and death. Uncle Ulick stared at the floor with a lowering face, and sighed, liking neither the past nor the prospect. The McMurrough, the Squireens, Sir Donny, and Burke, secretly uneasy, put on a reckless air to cover their apprehensions. The Bishop and Cammock, though they saw themselves in a fair way to do what they had come to do, looked thoughtful also. And only Flavia--only Flavia, shaking off the remembrance of Colonel John's face, and Colonel John's existence--closed her grip upon his sword, and in the ardour of her patriotism saw with her mind's eye not victory nor acclaiming thousands--no, nor the leaping line of pikemen charging for _his_ glory that her brother saw--but the scaffold, and a death for her country. Sweet it seemed to her to die for the cause, for the faith, to die for Ireland! To die as young Lord Derwentwater had died a year or two before; as Lady Nithsdale had been ready to die; as innumerable men and women had died, lifted above common things by the love of their country.

True, her country, her Ireland, was but this little corner of Kerry beaten by the Atlantic storms and sad with the wailing cries of seagulls; the rudest province of a land itself provincial. But if she knew no more of Ireland than this, she had read her story; and naught is more true than that the land the most down-trodden is also the best beloved. Wrongs beget a passion of affection; and from oppression springs sacrifice. This daughter of the windswept shore, of the misty hills and fairy glens, whose life from infancy had been bare and rugged and solitary, had become, for that reason, a dreamer of dreams and a worshipper of the ideal Ireland, her country, her faith. The salt breeze that lashed her cheeks and tore at her hair, the peat reek and the soft shadows of the bogland--ay, and many an hour of lonely communing--had filled her breast with love; such love as impels rather to suffering and to sacrifice than to enjoyment. Nor had she yet encountered the inevitable disappointments. Her eyes had not yet been opened to the seamy side of patriotism; to the sordid view of every great adventure that soon or late saddens the experienced and dispels the glamour of the dreamer.

For one moment she had recoiled before the shock of impending violence, the clash of steel, the reality of things. But that had passed; now her one thought, as she stood with dilated eyes, unconsciously clutching the Colonel's sword, was that the time was come, the thing was begun--henceforth she belonged not to herself, but to Ireland and to God.

Deep in such thoughts, the girl was not aware that the others had got together and were discussing the Colonel's fate until mention was made of the French sloop and of Captain Augustin. "Faith, and let him go in that!" she heard Uncle Ulick urging. "D'ye hear me, your reverence? 'Twill be a week before they land him, and the fire we'll be lighting will be no secret at all at all by then."

"May be, Mr. Sullivan," the Bishop replied--"may be. But we cannot spare the sloop."

"No, by the Holy Bones, and we'll not spare her!" The McMurrough chimed in. "She's heels to her, and it's a godsend she'll be to us if things go ill."

"And an addition to our fleet anyway," Cammock said. "We'd be mad to let her go--just to make a man safe, we can make safe a deal cheaper!"

Flavia propped the sword carefully in an angle of the hearth, and moved forward. "But I do not understand," she said timidly. "We agreed that the sloop and the cargo were to go free if Colonel Sullivan--but you know!" she added, breaking off and addressing her brother. "You were there."

"Is it dreaming you are?" he retorted contemptuously. "Is it we'll be taking note of that now?"

"It was a debt of honour," she said.

"The girl's right," Uncle Ulick said, "and we'll be rid of him."

"We'll be rid of him without that," The McMurrough muttered.

"I am fearing, Mr. Sullivan," the Bishop said, "that it is not quite understood by all that we are embarked upon a matter of the utmost gravity, upon a matter of life and death. We cannot let bagatelles stand in the way. The sloop and her cargo can be made good to her owners--at another time. For your relative and his servant----"

"The shortest way with them!" some one cried. "That's the best and the surest!"

"For them," the Bishop continued, silencing the interruption by a look, "we must not forget that some days must pass before we can hope to get our people together, or to be in a position to hold our own. During the interval we lie at the mercy of an informer. Your own people you know, and can trust to the last gossoon, I'm told. But the same cannot be said of this gentleman--who has very fixed ideas--and his servant. Our lives and the lives of others are in their hands, and it is of the last importance that they be kept secure and silent."

"Ay, silent's the word," Cammock growled.

"There could be no better place than one of the towers," The McMurrough suggested, "for keeping them safe, bedad!"

"And why'll they be safer there than in the house?" Uncle Ulick asked suspiciously. He looked from one speaker to another with a baffled face, trying to read their minds. He was sure that they meant more than they said.

"Oh, for the good reason!" the young man returned contemptuously. "Isn't all the world passing the door upstairs? And what more easy than to open it?"

Cammock's eyes met the Bishop's. "The tower'll be best," he said. "Devil a doubt of it! Draw off the people, and let them be taken there, and a guard set. We've matters of more importance to discuss now. This gathering to-morrow, to raise the country--what's the time fixed for it?"

But Flavia, who had listened with a face of perplexity, interposed. "Still, he is my prisoner, is he not?" she said wistfully. "And if I answer for him?"

"By your leave, ma'am," Cammock replied, with decision, "one word. Women to women's work! I'll let no woman weave a halter for me!"

The room echoed low applause. And Flavia was silent.


CHAPTER XI

A MESSAGE FOR THE YOUNG MASTER

James McMurrough was young, but he was a slave to as few of the generous ambitions of youth as any man of his years. At heart he cared little for his country, and nothing for his Faith--which indeed he had been ready to barter for an allowance, and a certain succession. He cared only for himself; and but for the resentment which the provisions of his grandfather's will had bred in him, he would have seen the Irish race in Purgatory, and the Roman faith in a worse place, before he would have risked a finger to right the one or restore the other. Even under the influence of that resentment, that bitterness, he had come into the conspiracy with but half a heart; without enthusiasm, and with an eye not so much to its ultimate success as to the gain he might make out of it in the meantime.

Once embarked, however, on the enterprise, vanity, the failing of light minds, and particularly of the Celtic mind, swept him onward. The night which followed Colonel Sullivan's arrest was a night long remembered at Morristown--a night to uplift the sanguine and to kindle the short-sighted; nor was it a wonder that the young chief--as he strode among his admiring tenants, his presence greeted, when he entered, with Irish acclamations, and his skirts kissed, when he passed, by devoted kernes--sniffed the pleasing incense, and trod the ground to the measure of imagined music. He felt himself a greater man this night than he had ever been before. The triumph that was never to be intoxicated him. He was Montrose, he was Claverhouse--a Montrose whom no Philiphaugh awaited, a Claverhouse whom no silver bullet would slay. He saw himself riding in processions, acclaimed by thousands, dictating to senates, the idol of a rejoicing Dublin.

His people had kindled a huge bonfire in the middle of the forecourt, and beside this he extended a gracious welcome to a crowd of strong tenants, whose picturesque figures, as they feasted, sang, drank, and fought, the fire silhouetted on the house front and the surrounding walls; now projecting them skywards, gigantic and menacing, now reducing them to dwarfs. A second fire, for the comfort of the baser sort, had been kindled outside the gates, and was the centre of merriment less restrained; while a third, which served as a beacon to the valley, and a proclamation of what was being done, glowed on the platform before the ruined tower at the head of the lake. From this last the red flames streamed far across the water; and now revealed a belated boat shooting from the shadow on its way across, now a troop of countrymen, who, led by their priest, came limping along the lake-side road; ostensibly to join in the religious services of the morrow, but in reality, as they knew, to hear something, and, God willing, to do something towards freeing old Ireland and shaking off the grip of the cursed Saxon.

In the more settled parts of the land, such a summons as had brought them from their rude shielings among the hills or beside the bogs, would have passed for a dark jest. But in this remote spot, the notion of overthrowing the hated power by means of a few score pikes, stiffened by half as many sailors from the Spanish ship in the bay, did not seem preposterous, either to these poor folk or to their betters. Cammock, of course, knew the truth, and the Bishop. Asgill, too, the one man cognisant of the movement who was not here, and of whom some thought with distrust--he, too, could appraise the attempt at its true worth. But of these men, the two first aimed merely at