His surprising coolness did more to check them than The McMurrough’s efforts. They gaped at him in wonder. Then one uttered an imprecation.
“The McMurrough will explain if you will go with him,” Colonel John answered patiently, “I say again, gentlemen, I shall not run away.”
“If you mean her any harm — —”
“I mean her no harm.”
“Are you alone?”
“I am alone.”
So far Morty. But Phelim O’Beirne was not quite satisfied. “If a hair of her head be hurt — —” he growled, pushing himself forward, “I tell you, sir — —”
“And I tell you!” James McMurrough retorted, repelling him. “What are the hairs of her head to you, Phelim O’Beirne? Am I not him that’s her brother? A truce to your prating, curse you, and be coming with me. I understand him, and that is enough!”
“But His Reverence — —”
“His Reverence is as safe as you or me!” James retorted. “If it were not so, are you thinking I’d be here? Fie on you!” he went on, pushing Phelim through the door; “you are good at the talking now, when it’s little good it will be doing! But where were you this morning when a good blow might have saved all?”
“Could I be helping it, when —— ?”
The voices passed away, still wrangling, across the courtyard. Uncle Ulick stepped to the door and closed it. Then he turned and spoke his mind.
“You were wrong to come back, John Sullivan,” he said, the hardness of his tone bearing witness to his horror of what had happened. “Shame on you! It is no thanks to you that your blood is not on the girl’s hands, and the floor of your grandfather’s house! You’re a bold man, I allow. But the fox made too free with the window at last, and, take my word for it, there are a score of men, whose hands are surer than this child’s, who will not rest till they have had your life! And after what has happened, can you wonder? Be bid and go then; be bid, and go while the breath is firm in you!”
Colonel John did not speak for a moment, and when he did answer, it was with a severity that overbore Ulick’s anger, and in a tone of contempt that was something new to the big man. “If the breath be firm in those whom you, Ulick Sullivan,” he said— “ay, you, Ulick Sullivan — and your fellows would have duped, it is enough for me! For myself, whom should I fear? The plotters whose childish plans were not proof against the simplest stratagem? The conspirators” — his tone grew more cutting in its scorn— “who took it in hand to pull down a throne and were routed by a Sergeant’s Guard? The poor puppets who played at a game too high for them, and, dreaming they were Sarsfields or Montroses, danced in truth to others’ piping? Shall I fear them,” he continued, the tail of his eye on the girl, who, sitting low in her chair, writhed involuntarily under his words— “poor tools, poor creatures, only a little less ignorant, only a little more guilty than the clods they would have led to the crows or the hangman? Is it these I am to fear; these I am to flee from? God forbid, Ulick Sullivan! I am not the man to flee from shadows!”
His tone, his manner, the truth of his words — which were intended to open the girl’s eyes, but did in fact increase her burning resentment — hurt even Uncle Ulick’s pride. “Whisht, man,” he said bitterly. “It’s plain you’re thinking you’re master here!”
“I am,” Colonel John replied sternly. “I am, and I intend to be. Nor a day too soon! Where all are children, there is need of a master! Don’t look at me like that, man! And for my cousin, let her hear the truth for once! Let her know what men who have seen the world think of the visions, from which she would have awakened in a dungeon, and the poor fools, her fellow-dupes, under the gibbet! A great rising for a great cause, if it be real, man, if it be earnest, if it be based on forethought and some calculation of the chances, God knows I hold it a fine thing, and a high thing! But the rising of a child with a bladder against an armed man, a rising that can ruin but cannot help, I know not whether to call it more silly or more wicked! Man, the devil does his choicest work through fools, not rogues! And, for certain, he never found a choicer morsel or fitter instruments than at Morristown yesterday.”
Uncle Ulick swore impatiently. “We may be fools,” he growled. “Yet spare the girl! Spare the girl!”
“What? Spare her the truth?”
“All! Everything!” Uncle Ulick cried, with unusual heat. “Cannot you see that she at least meant well!”
“Such do the most ill,” Colonel John retorted, with sententious severity. “God forgive them — and her!” He paused for a moment and then, in a lighter tone, he continued, “As I do. As I do gladly. Only there must be an end of this foolishness. The two men who knew in what they worked and had reason in their wrong-doing are beyond seas. We shall see their faces no more. The McMurrough is not so mad as to wish to act without them. He” — with a faint smile— “is not implacable. You, Ulick, are not of the stuff of whom martyrs are made, nor are Mr. Burke and Sir Donny. But the two young men outside” — he paused as if he reflected— “they and three or four others are — what my cousin now listening to me makes them. They are tow, if the flame be brought near them. And therefore — and therefore,” he repeated still more slowly, “I have spoken the truth and plainly. To this purpose, that there may be an end.”
Flavia had sat at first with closed eyes, in a state next door to collapse, her head inclined, her arms drooping, as if at any moment she might sink to the floor. But in the course of his speaking a change had come over her. The last heavings of the storm, physical and mental, through which she had passed, still shook her; now a quiver distorted her features, now a violent shudder agitated her from head to foot. But the indomitable youth in her, and the spirit which she had inherited from some dead forefather, were not to be long gainsaid. Slowly, as she listened — and mainly under the influence of indignation — her colour had returned, her face grown more firm, her form more stiff. In truth Colonel John had adopted the wrong course with her. He had been hard — knowing men better than women — when he should have been mild; he had browbeaten where he should have forgiven. And so at his last declaration, “There must be an end,” she rose to her feet, and spoke. And speaking, she showed that neither the failure of her attempt on him, nor the bodily struggle with him, horribly as it humiliated her in the remembrance, had quelled her courage.
“An end!” she said, in a voice vibrating with emotion. “Yes, but it will be an end for you! Children, are we? Well, better that, a thousand times better that, than be so old before our time, so cold of heart and cunning of head that there is naught real for us but that we touch and see, nothing high for us but that our words will be measuring, nothing worth risk but that we are safe to gain! Children, are we?” she continued, with deep passion. “But at least we believe! At least we own something higher than ourselves — a God, a Cause, a Country! At least we have not bartered all — all three and honour for a pittance of pay, fighting alike for right or wrong, betraying alike the right and wrong! Children? May be! But, God be thanked, we are warm, the blood runs in us — —”
“Flavia!”
“I say the blood runs in us!” she repeated. “And if we are foolish, as you say, we are wiser yet than one” — she looked at him with a strange and almost awful steadfastness— “who in his wisdom thinks that a traitor can walk our Irish soil unharmed, or one go back and forth in safety who has ruined and shamed us! You have escaped my hand! But I know that all your boasted wisdom will not lengthen your life till the moon wanes!”
He had tried to interrupt her once — eagerly, vividly, as one who would defend himself. He answered her now after another fashion: perhaps he had learnt his lesson. “If God wills,” he said simply, “it will be so; it will be as you say. And the road will lie open to you. Only while I live, Flavia, whether I love this Irish soil or not, or my country, or my honour, the storm shall not break here, nor the house fall from which we spring!”
“While you live!” she repeated, with a dreadful smile. “I tell you, I tell yo
u,” and she extended her hand towards him, “the winding-sheet is high upon your breast, and the salt dried that shall lie upon your heart.”
CHAPTER XVI
THE MARPLOT
If, after that, Colonel Sullivan’s life had depended on his courage or the vigilance of his servant, it is certain that, tried as was the one and unwinking as was the other, Flavia’s prophecy would have been quickly fulfilled. He would not have seen another moon, perhaps he would not have seen another dawn. The part which he had played in the events at the Carraghalin was known to few; but the hundred tongues of rumour were already abroad, carrying as many versions, and in all he was the marplot. His traffic with the Old Fox had spirited away the Holy Father in God — whom the saints preserve! — and swept off also, probably on a broom-stick, the doughty champion whose sole desire it was to lead the hosts of Ireland to victory. In the eyes of some ten score persons, scattered over half a dozen leagues of country, wild, and beyond the pale of law — persons who valued an informer’s life no higher than a wolf’s — he wore the ugly shape of one. And the logical consequence was certain. That the man who had done these things should continue to walk the sod, that the man who had these things on his black heretic conscience should continue to haunt the scene of his crimes and lord it over those whom his misdeeds had sullied, was to the common mind unthinkable — nay, incredible: a blot on God’s good day. To every potato-setter who, out of the corner of his eye, watched his passage, to every beggar by the road whose whine masked heart-felt curses, to the very children who fell back from the cabin door to escape his evil eye, this was plain and known, and the man already as the dead. For if the cotters by the lakeside were not men enough, the nights being at present moonlit, was there not Roaring Andy’s band in the hills, not seven miles away, who would cut any man’s throat for a silver doubloon, and a Protestant’s for the “trate it would be, and sorra a bit of pay at all, the good men!”
Beyond doubt the Colonel’s boldness, and the nerve which enabled him to take his place as if nothing threatened him, went for something; and for something the sinister prestige which the disappearance of O’Sullivan Og and his whole party cast about him. For there was wailing in the house by the jetty: the rising had cost some lives though nipped in the bud. The evening tide had cast the body of one of the men upon the shore, where it had been found among the sea-wrack; and, though the fate of the others remained a mystery, the messenger who had sped after Og with the counter-order told the story as he knew it. The means by which the two prisoners, in face of odds so great, had destroyed their captors, were still a secret; but the worst was feared. The Irish are ever open to superstitious beliefs, and the man who singlehanded could wreak such a vengeance, who poured death as it were from a horn, went his way by road and bog, shrouded in a gloomy fame that might provoke the bold, but kept the timid at bay. Before night it was known in a dozen lonely cabins that the Colonel might be shot from behind with a silver bullet: or stabbed, if a man were bold enough, with a cross-handled knife, blest and sprinkled. But woe to him whose aim proved faulty or his hand uncertain! His chance in the grasp of the Father of ill, or of the mis-shapen Trolls, revenants of a heathen race, who yearly profaned the Carraghalin with their orgies, had not been worse!
But this reputation alone, seeing that reckless spirits were not wanting, nor in the recesses of the hills those whose lives were forfeit, would have availed him little if the protection of The McMurrough had not been cast over him. Why it was cast over him, so that he went to and fro in safety — men scarcely dared to guess; it was a dark thing into which it were ill to peer too closely. But the fact was certain; so certain that the anxiety of the young man that the Colonel might meet with no hurt was plain and notorious, a thing observed stealthily and with wonder. Did Colonel John saunter across the court to the gateway, to look on the lake, The McMurrough was at his shoulder in a twinkling, and thence, with a haggard eye, searched the furze-bush for the glint of a gun-barrel, and the angle of the wall for a lurking foe. It was the same if the Colonel, who seemed himself unconscious of danger, fared as far as the ruined tower, or stretched his legs on the road by the shore. The McMurrough could not be too near him, walked with his hand on his arm, cast from time to time vigilant looks to the rear. A score of times between rising and sleeping Colonel John smiled at the care that forewent his steps and covered his retreat; nor perhaps had the contempt in which he held James McMurrough ever reached a higher pitch than while he thus stood from hour to hour indebted to that young man for his life.
What Uncle Ulick, if he held the key to the matter, thought of it, or how he explained it, if he had not, did not appear; nor, certain that the big man would favour a course of action that made for peace, was Colonel John overcurious to know. But what Flavia thought of the position was a point which aroused his most lively curiosity. He gave her credit for feelings so deep and for a nature so downright, that time-serving or paltering were the last faults he looked to find in her. He could hardly believe that she would consent to sit at meat with him after what had happened; and possibly — for men are strange, and the motives of the best are mixed — a desire to see how she would behave and how she would bear herself in the circumstances had something to do with the course he was taking.
That she consented to the plan was soon made clear. She even took part in it. James could not be always at his elbow. The young man must sometimes retire, it might be to vent his spleen in curses he dared not utter openly, it might be to take other measures for his safety. When this happened, the girl took her brother’s place, stooped to dog the Colonel’s footsteps, and for a day or two, while the danger hung most imminent, and every ditch to James’s fancy held a lurking foe, cast the mantle of her presence over the man she hated.
But stoop as she might, she never for a moment stooped to mask her hate. In her incomings and her outgoings, in her risings-up and at table with him, every movement of her body, the carriage of her head, the glance of her eye, showed that she despised him; that she who now suffered him was the same woman who had struck at his life, and, failing, repented only the failure. In all she did, in parleying with him, in bearing with his presence, in suffering his gaze, she made it plain that she did it against her will; as the captive endures perforce the company of the brigand in whose power he lies, but whom, when opportunity offers, he will deliver with avidity to the cord or the garotte. Because she must, and for her brother’s sake, for the sake of his name and pride and home, she was willing to do this, though she abhorred it; and though every time that she broke bread with the intruder, met his eyes, or breathed the air that he breathed, she told herself that it was intolerable, that it must end.
Once or twice, feeling the humiliation more than she could bear, she declared to her brother that the man must go. “Let him go!” she cried, in uncontrollable excitement. “Let him go!”
“But he will not be going, Flavvy.”
“He must go!” she replied.
“And Morristown his?” James would answer. “Ye are forgetting! Over and above that, he’s not one to do my bidding, nor yours!”
That was true. He would not go; he persisted in remaining and being master. But it was not there the difficulty lay. If he had not made a will before he came, a will that doubtless set the property of the family for ever beyond James’s reach, the thing had been simple and Colonel John’s shrift had been short. But now, to rid the earth of him was to place the power in the hands of an unknown person, a stranger, an alien, for whom the ties of family and honour would have no stringency. True, the law was weak in Kerry. A writ was one thing, and possession another. Whatever right a stranger might gain, it could only be with difficulty and after the lapse of years that he would make it good against the old family, or plant those about him who would ensure his safety. But it did not do to depend on this. Within the last generation, the McCarthys, a clan more powerful than the McMurroughs, had been driven from the greater part of their lands; and on every side English settlers were imping
ing on the old Irish families. A bold man might indeed keep the forces of law at bay for a time; but James McMurrough, notwithstanding the folly into which he had been led, was no desperado. He had no desire to live with a rope round his neck, to flee to the bog on the least alarm, and, in the issue, to give his name to an Irish Glencoe.
A stranger position it had been hard to conceive; or one more humiliating to a proud and untamed spirit such as Flavia’s. What arguments, what prayers, what threats The McMurrough used to bring her to it, Colonel Sullivan could not guess. But though she consented, her shame, her resentment, her hostility, were so patent that the effect was to pair off Colonel John and herself, to pit them one against the other, to match them one to one. The McMurrough, supple and insincere, found little difficulty in subduing his temper to his interests, though now and again his churlishness broke out. For Uncle Ulick, his habit was to be easy and to bid others be easy; the dawn and dark of a day reconciled him to most things. The O’Beirnes, sullen and distrustful, were still glad to escape present peril. Looking for a better time to come, they took their orders, helped to shield the common enemy, supposed it policy, and felt no shame. Flavia alone, in presence of the man who had announced that he meant to be master, writhed in helpless revolt, swore that he should never be her master, swore that whoever bowed the head she never would.
And Colonel Sullivan, seated, apparently at his ease, on the steep lap of danger, found that this hostility and the hostile person held his thoughts. A man may be an enthusiast in the cause of duty, he may have plucked from the hideous slough of war the rare blue flower of loving-kindness, he may in the strength of his convictions seem sufficient to himself; he will still feel a craving for sympathy. Colonel Sullivan was no exception. He found his thoughts dwelling on the one untamable person, on the one enemy who would not stoop, and whose submission seemed valuable. The others took up, in a greater or less degree, the positions he assigned to them, gave him lip-service, pretended that they were as they had been, and he as he had been. She did not; she would not.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 565
