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

life as young as yours--and I take you to be scarcely, sir, in your twenties--has been forfeit for a thoughtless word, an unwitting touch, a look; when you know how many a bride has been widowed as soon as wedded, how many a babe orphaned as soon as born? And for what? For what, sir?"

"For the point of honour!" The McMurrough cried. Morty, for his part, was dumb with astonishment. What talk was this!

"The point of honour?" the Colonel repeated, more slowly, "what is it? In nine cases out of ten the fear of seeming to be afraid. In the tenth--the desire to wipe out a stain that blood leaves as deep as before!"

"Faith, and you surprise me!" Phelim cried with a genuine _naivete_ that at another time would have provoked a smile. "You do indeed!"

"And Kerry'll more than surprise you," quoth The McMurrough rudely, "if it's that way you'll be acting! Would you let Crosby of Castlemaine call you thief?"

"I would not thieve!" the Colonel replied.

There was a stricken silence for a moment. Then The McMurrough sprang to his feet, his querulous face flushed with rage, his arm raised. But Ulick's huge hand dragged him down. "Easy, lad, easy," he cried, restraining the young man. "He's your guest! He's your guest; remember that!"

"And he spoke in haste," the Colonel said. "I withdraw my words," he continued, rising and frankly holding out his hand. "I recognise that I was wrong! I see that the act bears in your eyes a different aspect, and I beg your pardon, sir."

The McMurrough took the hand, though he took it sullenly; and the Colonel sat down again. His action, to say nothing of his words, left Phelim and Morty in a state of amazement so profound that the two sat staring as if carved out of the same block of wood.

If Colonel John noticed their surprise he seemed in no way put out by it. "Perhaps," he said gently, "it is wrong to thrust opinions on others unasked. I think that is so! It should be enough to act upon them one's self, and refrain from judging others."

No one answered. But one thing was certain: whether he judged them or not, they were all judging him, with such of their faculties as remained to them. True, Flavia, save by a single frightened glance when a quarrel seemed imminent, had not betrayed what she thought--nor now betrayed what she was thinking. Her eyes were glued to her plate. But the impression made on the others, not excepting the dependent buckeens who sat at the board a little apart and took no part in the talk, was so apparent that an onlooker must have laughed at their bewilderment. Even Uncle Ulick, whom a steady good humour had steered clear of many a brawl--so that a single meeting on Aghrim racecourse made up the tale of his exploits--stared vacantly at his kinsman. Never before had he heard any one question the right of an Irish gentleman to fight at pleasure; and for the others whose blood was hotter and younger, for the three Kerry Cocks, the Conclave had not been more surprised if a Cardinal had risen and denounced the Papacy, nor an assembly of half-pay captains been more astonished if one of their number had denounced the pension system. The Colonel was a Sullivan and an Irishman, and it was supposed that he had followed the wars. Whence, then, these strange words, these unheard-of opinions? Morty felt his cheek flush with the shame which Colonel John should have felt; and Phelim grieved for the family. The gentleman might be mad; it was charitable to think he was. But, mad or sane, he was like, they feared, to be the cause of sad misunderstanding in the country round.

The McMurrough, of a harder and less generous nature than his companions, felt more contempt than wonder. The man had insulted him grossly, and had apologised as abjectly; that was his view of the incident. And he was the first to break the silence. "Sure, it's very well for the gentleman it's in the family," he said dryly. "Tail up, tail down, 's all one among friends. But if he'll be so quick with his tongue in Tralee Market, he'll chance on one here and there that he'll not blarney so easily! Eh, Morty?"

"I'm fearing so, too," said Phelim pensively. Morty did not answer. "'Tis a queer world," Phelim added.

"And all sorts in it," The McMurrough cried, his tone more arrogant than before.

Flavia glanced at him, frowning. "Let us have peace now," she said.

"Peace? Sorrow a bit of war there's like to be in the present company!" the victor cried. And he began to whistle, amid an awkward silence. The air he chose was one well known at that day, and when he had whistled a few bars, one of the buckeens at the lower end of the table began to sing the words softly.

It was a' for our rightful king We left fair Ireland's strand! It was a' for our rightful king We e'er saw foreign land, my dear, We e'er saw foreign land!

"My dear, or no, you'll be doing well to be careful!" The McMurrough said, in a jeering tone, with his eye on the Colonel.

"Pho!" the man replied. "And I that have heard the young mistress sing it a score of times!"

"Ay, but not in this company!" The McMurrough rejoined.

Colonel John looked round the table. "If you mean," he said quietly, "that I am a loyal subject of King George, I am that. But what is said at my host's table, no matter who he is, is safe for me. Moreover, I've lived long enough to know, gentlemen, that most said is least meant, and that the theme of a lady's song is more often--sunset than sunrise!" And he bowed in the direction of the girl.

The McMurrough's lip curled. "Fair words," he sneered. "And easy to speak them, when you and your d--d Protestant Whigs are on top!"

"We won't talk of Protestants, d--d or otherwise!" Colonel John replied. And for the first time his glance, keen as the flicker of steel, crossed The McMurrough's. The younger man's eyes fell. A flush of something that might have been shame tinged his brow: and though no one at table save Uncle Ulick understood the allusion, his conscience silenced him. "I hope," the Colonel continued more soberly, "that a good Protestant may still be a good Irishman."

"It's not I that have seen one, then!" The McMurrough muttered churlishly.

"Just as a bad Protestant makes a bad Irishman," the Colonel returned, with another of those glances which seemed to prove that the old man was not quite put off.

The McMurrough was silenced. But the cudgels were taken up in an unexpected quarter. "I know nothing of bad or good," Flavia said, in a voice vibrating with eagerness, "but only, to our sorrow, of those who through centuries have robbed us! Who, not content, shame on them! with shutting us up in a corner of the land that was ours from sea to sea, deny us even here the protection of their law! Law? Can you call it law----"

"Heaven be between us and it!" old Darby groaned.

"Can you call it law," she continued with passion, "which denies us all natural rights, all honourable employments; which drives us abroad, divides son from father, and brother from brother; which bans our priests, and forbids our worship, and, if it had its will, would leave no Catholic from Cape Clear to Killaloe?"

The Colonel looked sorrowfully at her, but made no answer; for to much of what she said no answer could be made. On the other hand, a murmur passed round the board; and more than one looked at the stranger with compressed lips. "If you had your will," the girl continued, with growing emotion; "if your law were carried out--as, thank God! it is not, no man's heart being hard enough--to possess a pistol were to be pilloried; to possess a fowling-piece were to be whipped; to own a horse, above the value of a miserable garron, were to be robbed by the first rascal who passed! We must not be soldiers, nor sailors," she continued; "nay"--with bitter irony--"we may not be constables nor gamekeepers! The courts, the bar, the bench of our fatherland, are shut to us! We may have neither school nor college; the lands that were our fathers' must be held for us by Protestants, and it's I must have a Protestant guardian! We are outlaws in the dear land that is ours; we dwell on sufferance where our fathers ruled! And men like you, abandoning their country, abandoning their creed----"

"God forbid!" the Colonel exclaimed, much moved himself.

"Men like you uphold these things!"

"God forbid!" he repeated.

"But let Him forbid, or not forbid," she retorted, rising from her seat with eyes that flashed anger through tears, "we exist, and shall exist! And the time is coming, and comes soon--ay, comes perhaps to-day!--when we who now suffer for the true faith and the rightful King will raise our heads, and the Faithful Land shall cease to mourn and honest men to pine! And, ah"--with upraised face and clasped hands--"I pray for that day! I pray for that day! I----"

She broke off amid cries of applause, fierce as the barking of wolves. She struggled for a moment with her overmastering emotion, then, unable to continue or to calm herself, she turned from the table and fled weeping up the stairs.

Colonel John had risen. He watched her go with deep feeling; he turned to his seat again with a sigh. He was a shade paler than before, and the eyes which he bent on the board were dark with thought. He was unconscious of all that passed round him, and, if aware, he was heedless of the strength of the passions which she had unbridled--until a hand fell on his arm.

He glanced up then and saw that all the men had risen, and were looking at him--even Ulick Sullivan--with dark faces. A passion of anger clouded their gaze. Without a word spoken, they were of one mind. The hand that touched him trembled, the voice that broke the silence shook under the weight of the speaker's feelings.

"You'll be leaving here this day," the man muttered.

"I?" the Colonel said, taken by surprise. "Not at all."

"We wish you no harm, but to see your back. But you'll be leaving here."

The Colonel, his first wonder subdued, looked from one to another. "I am sure you wish me no harm," he said.

"None, but to see your back," the man repeated, while his companions looked down at the Colonel with a strange fixedness. The Celtic nature, prone to sudden rage, stirred in them. The stranger who an hour before had been indifferent to them now wore the face of an enemy. The lake and the bog--ay, the secret grave yearned for him: the winding-sheet was high upon his breast. "Stay, and it's but once in your life you'll be sorry," the man growled, "and faith, that'll be always!"

"But I cannot go," the Colonel answered, as gently as before.

"And why?" the man returned. The McMurrough was not of the speakers, but stood behind them, glowering at him with a dark face.

"Because," the Colonel answered,