They were seven very eventful months during which he remained shut up in that airy open-doored prison of his — months in which Ireland for the twentieth time in her history was once more in the throes of a convulsion, a convulsion of which Munster was this time the centre. They were months of anxiety for England, conscious that her enemies were looking eagerly towards the ever-vulnerable spot in her heel; they were months during which the star of the Desmonds was beginning to set for ever in blood and misery unspeakable. Maelcho knew nothing of all this; nothing of what for him were infinitely more important than any of these things. His own particular charges might be calling for him; might be wanting their big, loving nursery-maid; might be crying to their honey-man to come to them; to carry them about on his strong back; be their slave, their playfellow, their idolater. Maelcho simply lay upon the stones of his cave and did not know whether they were alive or dead. For him everything had narrowed down to those wearisome gleams, travelling across the floor, to the sough of the wind, to the roar of the sea, to the dull interminable recurrence of light and darkness, to his own tortured heart, and to his own fast maddening brain.
Chapter XXIV.
Those anxious stars, which watch over every man who is destined to succeed in life, must that year have kept a very careful eye upon Hugh Gaynard. In spite of the very inauspicious fashion of his arrival, a few weeks later found him not only still alive, but actually on the road to becoming quite an acceptable member of this new community into which he had fallen. His footing in it could hardly yet be called safe, since it was one which an incautious word would have endangered, and an incautious act have brought back within his horizon that halter which he had so recently escaped. Still, it was a wonderful one, all things considered.
He was not hung. The respite allowed time for his story to be heard, and as it turned out, to be believed. Once it began to be realised that he really was what he professed to be; that no taint of Irishry rested upon him, everything else fell easy and comfortably into its place. If he was free of that major sin, the chances were he was free of all other and comparatively minor ones. His relationship with the Gaynards of Yorkshire began to be believed in; his long stay amongst the O'Flahertys, and even his more recent and less explainable residence amongst the Munster rebels, all were inclined to be condoned. If he was an Englishman, the chances were that he could have done nothing very abominable. If in the end he turned out not to be an Englishman, well, there were always plenty of trees to hang him to upon.
It was not the dull and estimable Major Peters who had respited him, but the brilliant Lieutenant Fenwick, who became Hugh's especial protector, and the person to whom he had to look for such preferment as was likely to come his way. Hero worship was not one of Hugh Gaynard's weaknesses. The faculty was not strong in him by nature, and it had certainly not been drawn out by any of the company it had of late been his lot to keep. But Lieutenant Fenwick was a remarkable young man. He possessed all the mental nimbleness, the personal distinction, the curious, flower-like grace and attractiveness; he possessed also the sensitiveness of organisation, verging upon effeminacy; the clear cold tenacity of purpose; above all, the absolute and truly magnificent indifference as to the means by which that purpose was to be carried into effect. Young as he was, he had already mastered the whole secret of success and knew that it was to be summed up in the one word: readiness. He was always ready. No task was too hard for him, no distance too long, no duty too unpleasant, no risk too great for him to run. It had to be so, for he was strictly his own architect. The third son of a small country squire, he had found no patron at his elbow to call him cousin, no great man able and willing to take him by the hand, yet already, by sheer dint of wit and persistence, he had set his foot upon a ladder which, unless some blundering Irish skean interfered to baulk fortune and spoil so pretty a prospect, was tolerably certain to lead him to the very top.
For our excellent but somewhat slow-witted Hugh Gaynard, all this was of the nature of a revelation. Ever since he could remember, he on his side had been pricked on by a sturdy English hankering after success; success of the most practical sort, one that could be measured and felt. Those two twin altar fires, the altar of Respectability and the altar of Prosperity, had always gleamed before his eyes, only he had not in the least seen how he was to get any nearer to them. Now at last, he did begin to perceive the way. It was a steeper, as well as perhaps in some respects a more crooked road than he would have thought of finding out for himself, but he could see that it was the right one, he could see that it would lead him in the desired direction, and he was ready therefore to set foot upon it the very first moment that he got a chance of doing so.
As usual, that first step was the difficulty. Indeed, any friendly connection between the rebel with the rope dangling before his nose and the officer who had just condemned him to it might well have seemed impossible. Happily, it proved not to be so. Like the rest of the camp, Fenwick soon left off thinking of Hugh as a rebel. He accordingly began to patronise him; released him from his bonds; took him in hand; clothed him; made him in a way his own personal retainer and follower. The human materials in the camp were not of the choicest, and it was a comfort to find someone who was neither a yokel, nor a drunkard. Fenwick, moreover, would not have been the superior man he was if he had not been shrewd enough to know the value of devotion, one which was based upon solid grounds, and which therefore could be reckoned upon. It soon appeared, too, that there were points in which the grateful mouse could aid the benignant lion. Hugh had not lived for years amongst the O'Flahertys for nothing. The time that he had so mourned over as lost had not been so utterly lost as he had imagined. It had taught him to know the ins and the outs of Irish life, and as a consequence of Irish warfare, as no man who has not seen it from the inside possibly could know it. Like Malby, Fenwick was not one of those bigots who believe that all campaigns are to be fought in the same fashion. Like Malby again, he had quickly realised that if you mean to defeat a people, the first thing to do is to learn in some degree to understand them. This knowledge of Hugh's lay therefore right in the very path of his own ambition.
Chapter XXV.
October in Ireland may be one of the best months in the year, or it may be only November a little antedated. It was the last variety in 1579. For many weeks, there had hardly been one moderately dry day, and men and beasts alike were drenched, miserable, and discouraged.
It was especially bad weather for a sick man, and Sir William Drury, the Lord Justice and Commander of the Forces, was a very sick man. The “country's fever,” that mysterious and happily vanished malady, which throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries annually decimated the troops sent on outlying service in Ireland, had laid its hands upon him, and there seemed very little probability that he would ever shake off its grasp again. What made his plight the more serious, not only for himself but the whole country, was that every other officer in Ireland held his commission directly under his hand; the result being that at his death, the whole machinery of government would come to an absolute deadlock. The consciousness of this fact was at the present moment paralysing the campaign. The commander's face was watched even more anxiously than the face of the skies.
The campaign itself was not exactly child's play. Kilmallock, until recently the main seat of the Desmonds' power, had for some years become, for military purposes, the capital of all that great forest country stretching from Mallow to near Limerick, between which towns it lay about midway. A rude road ran from one point to the other, and there were also a few horse-tracks here and there, but throughout the greater part of its extent, it was trackless and impenetrable, a jungle utterly impassable for anyone not absolutely a native of the district. For garrison purposes, it was indeed a good deal worse than trackless, for it was full of minute paths, intimately known to those who made use of them, but invisible to ordinary observation; paths which branched and re-branched in a complicated network, and the entrances and exits of which were sedulousl
y concealed by those who used them.
Throughout all this part of Ireland, the forest had indeed modified the inhabitants very much more than the inhabitants had the forest. Their ways, their thoughts, their habits of locomotion, their very bodies had become adapted to their environment. Strip them of their leafy sheath, and they would hardly have known how to exist. A roof might be, and in many cases was, a mere superfluity, but a sky without some sort of midway break of twigs and leaves was an object foreign and inconceivable.
At the present moment, the whole forest was known to be swarming with the light-footed Kerry kern, under the leadership of the two younger Geraldines. The Earl of Desmond, on the other hand, had recently come into camp and there made his submission to Drury, protesting positively that he had had no share in his brother's misdoings. That these protestations were not believed goes without saying, and in the meantime he was retained in a state of quasi captivity, as a measure of precaution, and while awaiting the further development of events.
The poor Lord Justice was much to be pitied. He was consumed with a wild desire to do something, yet it was far from equally clear to him what that something was to be. With the sense of growing weakness, there had come upon him a growing desire to strike some effective blow, one that could be reported at in high quarters, so that when he retired — as retire he plainly soon must — he might at least do so with credit and honour. Unfortunately, there was no very decisive blow that could be struck just then. As long as the rebels chose to cling to the woods, to attempt to dislodge them from there by force would only be to court failure, since all the local conditions were directly in their favour and against their antagonists. The game to be played was a waiting game, only Sir William Drury had unfortunately no time to wait.
With his usual brilliant common, Sir Nicholas Malby did not fail to perceive this and had no hesitation about expressing it.
“Methinks our good Lord Justice is afflicted with the lunes, at the heels of all his other complaints!” he observed in the ear of his favourite lieutenant, Fenwick. “Does he think that we can herd these bloody-fingered Desmond galloglasses as a shepherd herds sheep upon the downs of Kent? That with our loutish rascals, untrained to footmanship, hot from clay lands and the slow following of ploughs, we can run down yon nimble-toed villains, taught from the very breast to keep up with the best horse foaled! 'Tis frenzy, sir, sheer frenzy, and a right dangerous frenzy to boot. Our course is plain. Starve them, and we have them. Starve them, and we drive them out of their retreat into the open. Once rid of these thrice accursed jungles, we fall upon them, and, if one of the minching rascals escapes to tell the tale, call me for the rest of my life counter-caster and not soldier.”
All this was perfectly true. But the poor Lord Justice continued in his own course, proof against all arguments, and the utmost that Malby could obtain was that, before attempting to drive the Geraldines out of their shelter, some effort should be made to ascertain whereabouts they lay, and in what strength they were then posted. Here again, however, there were great difficulties. Malby had under his own command at Kilmallock a considerable body of Connacht men, whom he believed that he had reduced by terror to obedience. Some of these he now sent out, but the reports they brought back were conflicting to the last degree. Plainly, it was necessary that someone should go whose report could be trusted.
True to his principle of always volunteering for any service, no matter how hazardous or unpleasant, Fenwick at once undertook the mission. With Sir Nicholas's permission, he would take a small body of soldiers with him, merely as a guard, and for the rest would depend wholly upon his own observations, supplemented by those of the young man Hugh Gaynard, who would supply his own lack of Irish, and upon whom he could, he knew, absolutely count. This proposal Malby, after some little hesitation, agreed to, and Fenwick obtained leave to try what he could do, positive orders being, however, given to him by Drury himself that he was not to delay; that he was to content himself with a mere general reconnaissance, and above all, that he was to return to the camp as rapidly as possible.
Accordingly, he selected about a dozen men out of his own detachment, consisting of four or five old soldiers, with a few of the more promising of the recruits. Hugh Gaynard alone he informed of the purpose of the expedition, the rest being merely told that they were to leave Kilmallock as rapidly as possible and, once in the woods, were to avoid straying; an order which, owing to recent events, was indeed hardly necessary.
They set out about three o'clock in the afternoon, not by the usual road, but along a narrower track, which would take them more directly to where the rebels were reported to be mustered. Almost immediately after passing the gates of Kilmallock, the forest seemed to open bodily and to swallow them up. It was still broad daylight outside, but here under the shadow of the trees twilight appeared to have already arrived. Sometimes, they came suddenly upon small pitch-black pools, lying half hidden amongst the tree roots, their edges lost in dense fringes of grass. Sometimes, they skirted the edges of round bogs, rising like big brown sponges in the middle of the forest.
The men obeyed orders, walking one behind the other, almost upon each other's heels, speaking only in husky whispers and casting uncomfortable glances at the rain-blackened branches, which crossed and recrossed one another above their heads. They advanced in this manner for some three or four hours. The rain had begun again and was falling with a stealthy depressing “flip,” “flop,” which was repeated in subdued chorus by every leaf overhead and every bunch of herbage under their feet. It was impossible to tell whether the thickets and copses through which their path ran were occupied or empty. The soldiers kept taking stealthy glances to right and left over their own shoulders. This creeping along at a foot's pace through a country known to be swarming with rebels, and believed to be swarming with other things, worse even than rebels, was a trial of the nerves such as very few of them were equal to.
Fenwick, meanwhile, was making up his mind to leave his escort behind him and to go on with only Hugh Gaynard. Apart from their fears, the soldiers were absolutely useless. They might do well enough in the open, but here in this deceitful entanglement they were simply so many hindrances and additional dangers. They coughed; they grunted; they stumbled against one another and against everything in their path; their boots creaked; their leather corselets squeaked; their heavy beef-fed bodies seemed to be getting bigger and more conspicuous every minute. It was like trying to achieve some delicate and intricate piece of stalking with a whole drove of buffaloes at one's heels.
Having arrived at an opening, easily distinguishable by a single tall fir tree which stood in the centre of it, Fenwick called a halt. Desiring his men to remain where they were and strictly forbidding them to light a fire or do anything that could help to reveal their presence, he covered himself hastily with an Irish mantle of the ordinary “shag-rug” pattern, brought for the purpose. Desiring Hugh Gaynard to put on a similar one and to draw the hood well down over his eyes, they got out together side by side through the forest.
Chapter XXVI.
The rain fell with a dogged sulky sort of persistence. As the two young men pushed them aside, the wet branches swung back in their faces with a dull swishing noise. It was not cold, but the sense of all-pervading moisture was chilling and depressing to the last degree. Hugh was now in front, having been desired by Fenwick to lead the way. With the resumption of his Irish dress, he had fallen instinctively into the swinging noiseless step and gait which he had acquired amongst the O'Flahertys. This Fenwick, with ready adaptability, imitated, and the two kept close together, swinging along one behind the other as though to the manner born. In their woollen “shag-rug” mantles, with the hoods pulled low down over their eyes and with this noiseless swinging step, their disguise was about as complete as it well could be.
In spite of the undeniable unpleasantness of the expedition, Hugh felt in unusually good spirits. A sense of elation and exhilaration, to which for a long time he had been a stranger
, seemed to pervade his entire frame. The consciousness of being necessary, of being — if only for the moment — the leader and director of the expedition, gave him a delightful foretaste of future hours of leadership, which, it was to be hoped, would not be equally momentary. Through the openings between the trees, warm heady gusts of wind smote against his face and awakened a curiously vivid sense of coming success and triumph. Sober-sided as he was, he was after all only eighteen, and his youth was still hot within him, so that there were moments when it could still sweep him along with it.
Spaces of sky, about the size of a pocket-handkerchief, became visible here and there overhead. Then these would close tightly up again, and it would become nearly pitch dark. The tree-trunks were so saturated with rain, that to touch them was like touching a sponge, the fingers seeming to get actually engulfed in them. It was extraordinarily close, too. An all-pervading smell of rotting vegetation seemed to fill not merely the nostrils, but the very brain. Where they now were, the tree-trunks rose straight up, one above the other, for they were climbing a bit of slope, upon the other side of which, according to report, the rebels were posted.
Suddenly, Hugh Gaynard stopped and hold up his hand to Fenwick as a warning to him to keep still. Then, stooping nearly double, he glided stealthily on a few paces forward, until he found himself upon a sort of ridge. Lying down here upon his stomach, he peered steadily over for a few minutes, then lifting his head very cautiously, he signalled to Fenwick to join him. Fenwick did so, advancing in the same gliding snake-like fashion till he was beside him. They were now upon the top of a low hill or mound, overlooking that peculiarly tangled piece of forest, known to the garrison as the “Black Wood,” and could see for a considerable distance ahead of them. All over this part of the forest, a crowd of red dots, like an overgrown swarm of bees, had become visible. The swarm was not arranged with any particular symmetry, but from the number of the red dots visible, as well as from the space of ground they covered, it was easy to see that they indicated the whereabouts of a very considerable force. A subdued murmur of voices reached the ears of the two young men as they remained there crouching side by side amongst the wet herbage. Now the sound would become quite loud, rising higher and higher, as the waves rise upon a seashore, then it would sink and sink, till it seemed to be a mere elemental murmur.
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