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

the natives disposed him to expect nothing from them. On the contrary, he found it natural that these savages should sit silent before a man of the world, and, like the clowns they were, find nothing to say fit for a gentleman to hear. Under such circumstances he was not unwilling to pose before them in an indolent, insolent fashion, to show them what a great person he was, and to speak of things beyond their ken. Playing this part, he would have enjoyed himself tolerably--nor the less because now and again he let his contempt for the company peep from under his complaisance--but for the obtuseness, or the malice of his friend; who, as if he had only one man and one idea in his head, let fall with every moment some mention of Colonel John. Now, it was the happy certainty of the Colonel's return next day that inspired his eloquence; now, the pleasure with which the Colonel would meet Payton again; now, the lucky chance that found a pair of new foils on the window ledge among the fishing-tackle, the old fowling-pieces, and the ragged copies of _Armida_ and _The Don_.

"For he's ruined entirely and no one to play with him!" Asgill continued, a twinkle, which he made no attempt to hide, in his eye. "No one, I'm meaning, Major, of his sort of force at all! Begad, boys, you'll see some fine fencing for once! Ye'll think ye've never seen any before I'm doubting!"

"I'm not sure that I can remain to-morrow," Payton said in a surly tone. For he began to suspect that Asgill was quizzing him. He noticed that every time the Justice named Colonel Sullivan, whether he referred to his return, or exalted his prowess, a sensation, a something that was almost a physical stir passed round the table. Men looked furtively at one another, or looked straight before them, as if they were in a design. If that were so, the design could only be to pit Colonel Sullivan against him, or in some way to provoke a quarrel between them. He felt a qualm of distrust and apprehension, for he remembered the words the Colonel had used in reference to their next meeting; and he was confirmed in the plan he had already formed--to be gone next day. But in the meantime his temper moved him to carry the war into the enemy's country.

"I didn't know," he snarled, taking Asgill up in the middle of a eulogy of Colonel John's skill, "that he was so great a favourite of yours."

"He was not," Asgill replied drily.

"He is now, it seems!" in the same sneering tone.

"We know him better. Don't we, boys?"

They murmured assent.

"And the lady whose horse I sheltered for you," the Major continued, spitefully watching for an opening--"confound you, little you thanked me for it!--she must be still more in his interest than you. And how does that suit your book?"

Asgill had great self-control, and the Major was not, except where his malice was roused, a close observer. But the thrust was so unexpected that on the instant Payton read the other's secret in his eyes--knew that he loved, and knew that he was jealous. Jealous of Sullivan! Jealous of the man whom he was for some reason praising. Then why not jealous of a younger, a more proper, a more fashionable rival? Asgill's cunningly reared plans began to sink, and even while he answered he knew it.

"She likes him," he said, "as we all do."

"Some more, some less," Payton answered with a grin.

"Just so," the Irishman returned, controlling himself. "Some more, some less. And why not, I'm asking."

"I think I must stay over to-morrow," Payton remarked, smiling at the ceiling. "There must be a good deal to be seen here."

"Ah, there is," Asgill answered in apparent good humour.

"Worth seeing, too, I'll be sworn!" the Englishman replied, smiling more broadly.

"And that's true, too!" the other rejoined.

He had himself in hand; and it was not from him that the proposal to break up the party came. The Major it was who at last pleaded fatigue. Englishmen's heads, he said, were stronger than their stomachs; they were a match for port but not for claret. "Too much Bordeaux," he continued, with careless contempt, "gives me the vapours next day. It's a d--d sour drink, I call it! Here's a health to Methuen and sound Oporto!"

"You should correct it, Major, with a little cognac," The McMurrough suggested politely.

"Not to-night; and, by your leave, I'll have my man called and go to bed."

"It's early," James McMurrough said, playing the host.

"It is, but I'll have my man and go to bed," Payton answered, with true British obstinacy. "No offence to any gentleman."

"There's none will take it here," Asgill answered. "An Irishman's house is his guest's castle." But, knowing that Payton liked his glass, he wondered; until it occurred to him that the other wished to have his hand steady for the sword-play next day. He meant to stay, then! "Hang him! Hang him!" he repeated in his mind.

The McMurrough, who had risen, took a light and attended his guest to his room. Asgill and the O'Beirnes--the smaller folk had withdrawn earlier--remained seated at the table, the young men scoffing at the Englishman's weak head, and his stiffness and conceit of himself, Asgill silent and downcast. His scheme for ridding himself of Payton had failed; it remained to face the situation. He did not distrust Flavia; no Englishman, he was sure, would find favour with her. But he distrusted Payton, his insolence, his violence, and the privileged position which his duellist's skill gave him. And then there was Colonel John. If Payton learned what was afoot at the Tower, and saw his way to make use of it, the worst might happen to all concerned.

He looked up at a touch from Morty, and to his astonishment he saw Flavia standing at the end of the table. There was a hasty scrambling to the feet, for the men had not drunk deep, and by all in the house, except her brother, the girl was treated with respect. After a fashion, they were to a man in love with her.

"I was thinking," Asgill said, foreseeing trouble, "that you were in bed and asleep." Her hair was tied back negligently and her dress half-fastened at the throat.

"I cannot sleep," she answered. And then she stood a moment drumming with her slender fingers on the table, and the men noticed that she was unusually pale. "I cannot sleep," she repeated, a tremor in her voice. "I keep thinking of him. I want some one--to go to him."

"Now?"

"Now!"

"But," Asgill said slowly, "I'm thinking that to do that were to give him hopes. It were to spoil all. Once in twenty-four hours--that was agreed, and he was told. And it is not four hours since you were there. If there is one thing needful, not the least doubt of it!--it is to leave him thinking that we're meaning it."

He spoke gently and reasonably. But the girl laboured, it was plain, under a weight of agitation that did not suffer her to reason, much less to answer him reasonably. She was as one who wakes in the dark night, with the terror of an evil dream upon him, and cannot for a time shake it off. "But if he dies?" she cried in a woeful tone. "If he dies of hunger? Oh, my God, of hunger! What have we done then? I tell you," she continued, struggling with overwhelming emotion, "I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it!" She looked from one to the other as appealing to each in turn to share her horror, and to act. "It is wicked, it is wicked!" she continued, in a shriller tone and with a note of defiance in her voice, "and who will answer for it? Who will answer for it, if he dies? I, not you! I, who tricked him, who lied to him, who lured him there!"

For a moment there was a stricken silence in the room. Then, "And what had he done to you?" Asgill retorted with spirit--for he saw that if he did not meet her on her own plane she was capable of any act, however ruinous. "Or, if not to you, to Ireland, to your King, to your Country, to your hopes?" He flung into his voice all the indignation of which he was master. "A trick, you say? Was it not by a trick he ruined all? The fairest prospect, the brightest day that ever dawned for Ireland! The day of freedom, of liberty, of----"

She twisted her fingers feverishly together. "Yes," she said, "yes! Yes, but--I can't bear it! I can't! I can't! It is no use talking," she continued with a violent shudder. "You are here--look!" she pointed to the table strewn with the remains of the meal, with flasks and glasses and tall silver-edged horns. "But he is--starving! Starving!" she repeated, as if the physical pain touched herself.

"You shall go to him to-morrow! Go, yourself!" he replied in a soothing tone.

"I!" she cried. "Never!"

"Oh, but----" Asgill began, perplexed but not surprised by her attitude--"But here's your brother," he continued, relieved. "He will tell you--he'll tell you, I'm sure, that nothing can be so harmful as to change now. Your sister," he went on, addressing The McMurrough, who had just descended the stairs, "she's wishing some one will go to the Colonel, and see if he's down a peg. But I'm telling her----"

"It's folly entirely, you should be telling her!" James McMurrough replied, curtly and roughly. Intercourse with Payton had not left him in the best of tempers. "To-morrow at sunset, and not an hour earlier, he'll be visited. And then it'll be you, Flavvy, that'll speak to him! What more is it you're wanting?"

"I speak to him?" she cried. "I couldn't!"

"But it'll be you'll have to!" he replied roughly. "Wasn't it so arranged?"

"I couldn't," she replied, in the same tone of trouble. "Some one else--if you like!"

"But it's not some one else will do," James retorted.

"But why should I be the one--to go?" she wailed. She had Colonel John's face before her, haggard, sunken, famished, as, peering into the gloomy, firelit room, she had seen it that afternoon, ay, and as she had seen it later against the darkness of her bedroom. "Why should I," she repeated, "be the one to go?"

"For a very good reason," her brother retorted with a sneer. And he looked at Asgill and laughed.

That look, which she saw, and the laugh which went with it, startled her as a flash of light startles a traveller groping through darkness. "Why?" she repeated in a different tone. "Why?"

But neither her tone nor Asgill's warning glance put James McMurrough on his guard; he was in one of his brutal humours. "Why?" he replied. "Because he's a silly fool, as I'm thinking some others are, and has a fancy for you, Flavvy! Faith, you're not blind!"--he continued, forgetting that he had only learned the fact from Asgill a few days before, and that it was news to the younger men--"and know it, I'll be sworn, as well as I do! Any way, I've a notion that if you let him see that there is no one in the house wishes him worse than you, or would see him starve, the stupid fool, with a lighter heart--I'm thinking it will be for bringing him down, if anything will!"