Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  Presently he discovered with surprise that her attitude rendered him unhappy. Secure in his sense of right, certain that he was acting for the best, looking from a height of experience on that lowland in which she toiled forward, following will-of-the-wisps, he should have been indifferent. But he was not indifferent.

  Meantime, she believed that there was no length to which she would not go against him; she fancied that there was no weapon which she would not stoop to pick up if it would hurt him. And presently she was tried. A week had passed since the great fiasco. Again it was the eve of Sunday, and in the usual course of things a priest would appear to celebrate mass on the following day. This risk James was now unwilling to run. His fears painted that as dangerous which had been done safely Sunday by Sunday for years; and in a hang-dog, hesitating way, he let Flavia know his doubts.

  “Devil take me if I think he’ll suffer it!” he said, kicking up the turf with his toe. They were standing together by the waterside, Flavia rebelling against the consciousness that it was only outside their own walls that they could talk freely. “May be,” he continued, “it will be best to let Father O’Hara know — to let be for a week or two.”

  The girl turned upon him, in passionate reprehension. “Why?” she cried, “Why?”

  “Why, is it you’re asking?” James answered sullenly. “Well, isn’t he master for the time, bad luck to him! And if he thinks we’re beginning to draw the boys together, he’ll maybe put his foot down! And I’d rather be stopping it myself, I’m telling you, and it’s the truth, too, just for a week or two, Flavvy, than be bidden by him.”

  “Never!” she cried.

  “But — —”

  “Never! Never! Never!” she repeated firmly. “Let us turn our back on our king by all means! But on our God, no! Let him do his worst!”

  He was ashamed to persist, and he took another line. “I’m thinking of O’Hara,” he said. “It’ll be four walls for him, or worse, if he’s taken.”

  “There’s no one will be taking him,” she answered steadfastly.

  “But if he is?”

  “I’m saying there’s no one will be taking him.”

  James felt himself repulsed. He shrugged his shoulders and was silent. Presently, “Flavvy,” he said in a low tone, “I’ve a notion, my girl. And it’ll serve, I’m thinking. This can’t be lasting.”

  She looked at him without much hope.

  “Well?” she said coldly. She had begun to find him out.

  He looked at her cunningly. “We might put the boot on the other leg,” he said. “He’s for informing. But what if we inform, my girl? It’s the first in the field that’s believed. He’s his tale of the Spanish ship, and you know who. But what if we tell it first, and say that he came with them and stayed behind to get us to move? Who’s to say he didn’t land from the Spaniard, if we’re all in a tale? And faith, he’s no friend here nor one that will open his mouth for him. A word at Tralee will do it, and Luke Asgill has friends there, that will be glad to set the ball rolling at his bidding. Once clapped up John Sullivan may squeal, he’ll not be the one to be believed, but those that put him there. It’ll be no more than to swear an information, and Luke Asgill will do the rest.”

  Flavia shuddered. “They won’t take his life?” she asked.

  James frowned. “That would not suit us at all,” he said. “Not at all! We could do that for ourselves. Faith,” with a sudden laugh, “you didn’t lack much of doing it, Flavvy! No; but a stone box and a ring round his leg, and four walls to talk to — until such time as we have a use for him, would be mighty convenient for everybody. He’d have leisure to think of his dear relations, and of the neat way he outwitted them, the clever devil! But for taking his life — I’m seeing my way there too,” with a grin— “it was naming his dear relations made me think of it. They’d not bear to be informing without surety for his life, to be sure! No!” with a chuckle. “And very creditable to them!”

  Flavia stared across the water. She was very pale.

  “We’ll be wanting one or two to swear to it,” he continued, “and the rest to be silent. Sorra a bit of difficulty will there be about it!”

  “But if,” she said slowly, “he gets the first word? And tells the truth?”

  “The truth?” James McMurrough replied scornfully. “The truth is what we’ll make it! I’ll see to that, my jewel.”

  She shivered. “Still,” she said, “it will not be truth.”

  “What matter?” James answered. “It will cook his goose. Curse him,” he continued with violence, “what right had he to come here and thrust himself into other folks’ affairs?”

  “I could have killed him,” she said. “But — —”

  “But you can’t,” he rejoined. “And you know why.”

  “But this” — she continued with a shudder, “this is different.”

  “What will you be after?” he cried impatiently. “You are not turning sheep-hearted at this time of day?”

  “I am not sheep-hearted.”

  “What is it then, my girl?”

  “I can’t do this,” she said. She was still very pale. Something had come close to her, had touched her, that had never approached her so nearly before.

  He stared at her. “But he’ll have his life,” he said.

  “It’s not that,” she answered slowly. “It’s the way. I can’t!” she repeated. “I’ve tried, and I can’t! It sickens me.”

  “And he’s to do what he likes with us?” James cried.

  “No, no!”

  “And we’re not to touch him without our gloves?”

  She did not answer, and twice her brother repeated the taunt — twice asked her, with a confidence he did not feel, what was the matter with the plan. At last, “It’s too vile!” she cried passionately. “It’s too horrible! It’s to sink to what he is, and worse!” Her voice trembled with the intensity of her feelings — as a man, who has scaled a giddy height without faltering, sometimes trembles when he reaches the solid ground. “Worse!” she repeated.

  To relieve his feelings, perhaps to hide his shame, he cursed his enemy anew. And “I wish I had never told you!” he added bitterly.

  “It’s too late now,” she replied.

  “Asgill could have managed it, and no one the wiser!”

  “I believe you!” she replied quickly. “But not you! Don’t do it, James,” she repeated, laying her hand on his arm and speaking with sudden heat. “Don’t you do it! Don’t!”

  “And we’re to let the worst happen,” he retorted, “and O’Hara perhaps be seized — —”

  “God forbid!”

  “That’s rubbish! And this man be seized, and that man, as he pleases! We’re to let him rule over us, and we’re to be good boys whatever happens, and serve King George and turn Protestants, every man of us!”

  “God forbid!” she repeated strenuously.

  “As well turn,” he retorted, “if we are to live slaves all our days! By Heaven, Cammock was right when he said that he would let no woman knit a halter for his throat!”

  She did not ask him who had been the life and soul of the movement, whose enthusiasm had set it going, and whose steadfastness maintained it. She did not say that whatever the folly of the enterprise, and however ludicrous its failure, she had gone into it whole-hearted, and with one end in view. She did not tell him that the issue was a hundred times more grievous and more galling to her than to him. Her eyes were beginning to be opened to his failings, she was beginning to see that all men did not override their womenfolk, or treat them roughly. But the habit of giving way to him was still strong; and when, with another volley of harsh, contemptuous words, he flung away from her, though her last interjection was a prayer to him to refrain, she blamed herself rather than him.

  Now that she was alone, too, the priest’s safety weighed on her mind. If Colonel John betrayed him, she would never forgive herself. Certainly it was unlikely he would; for in that part priests moved freely, the authorities w
inked at their presence, and it was only within sight of the walls of Tralee or of Galway that the law which proscribed them was enforced. But her experience of Colonel Sullivan — of his activity, his determination, his devilish adroitness — made all things seem possible. He had been firm as fate in the removal of the Bishop and Cammock; he had been turned no jot from his purpose by her prayers, her rage, her ineffectual struggles — she sickened at the remembrance of that moment. He was capable of everything, this man who had come suddenly into their lives out of the darkness of far Scandinavia, himself dark and inscrutable. He was capable of everything, and if he thought fit — but at that point her eyes alighted on a man who was approaching along the lake-road. It was Father O’Hara himself. The priest was advancing as calmly and openly as if no law made his presence a felony, or as if no Protestant breathed the soft Irish air for a dozen leagues about.

  Her brother’s words had shaken Flavia’s nerves. She was courageous, but she was a woman. She flew to meet the priest, and with every step his peril loomed larger before her fluttered spirits. The wretch had said that he would be master, and a master who was a Protestant, a fanatic ——

  She did not follow the thought to its conclusion. She waved a warning even before she reached the Father. When she did, “Father!” she cried eagerly, “you must get away, and come back after dark!”

  The good man’s jaw fell. He had been looking forward to good cheer and a good bed, to a rare oasis of comfort in his squalid life. He cast a wary look round him. “What has happened, my daughter?” he stammered.

  “Colonel Sullivan!” Flavia gasped. “He is here, and he will certainly give you up.”

  “Colonel Sullivan?”

  “Yes. You were at the Carraghalin? You have heard what happened! He will surely give you up!”

  “Are the soldiers here?” the priest asked, with a blanched face.

  “No, but he is here! He is in the house, and may come out at any moment,” Flavia explained. “Don’t you understand?”

  “Did he tell you — —”

  “What?”

  “That he would inform?”

  “No!” Flavia replied, thinking the man very dull. “But you wouldn’t trust him?”

  The priest looked round to assure himself that the landscape held no overt signs of danger. Then he brought back his eyes to the girl’s face, and he stroked his thin, brown cheek reflectively. He recalled the scene in the bog, Colonel John’s courage, and his thought for his servant. And at last, “I am not thinking,” he said coolly, “that he will betray me. I am sure — I think I am sure,” he continued, correcting himself, “that he will not. He is a heretic, but he is a good man.”

  Flavia’s cheek flamed. She started back. “A good man!” she cried in a voice audible half a hundred yards away.

  Father O’Hara looked a little ashamed of himself; but he stood by his guns. “A heretic, of course,” he said. “But, I’m thinking, a good man. At any rate, I’m not believing that he will inform against me.”

  As quickly as it had come, the colour fled from Flavia’s face, and left it cold and hard. She looked at the priest as she had never looked at a priest of her Church before. “You must take your own course then,” she said. And with a gesture which he did not understand she turned from him, and leaving him, puzzled and disconcerted, she went away into the house.

  A good man! Heaven and earth and the sea besides! A good man! Father O’Hara was a fool! A fool!

  CHAPTER XVII

  THE LIMIT

  If there was one man more sorry than another that the Morristown rising had been nipped in the bud it was Luke Asgill. It stood to his credit that, though he had never dared to cross Flavia’s will, he had tried, and honestly tried, to turn James McMurrough from the attempt. But even while doing this, he had known — as he had once told James with bitter frankness — that his interest lay in the other scale; he had seen that had he attended to it only, he would not have dissuaded The McMurrough, but, on the contrary, would have egged him on, in the assurance that the failure of the plot would provide his one best chance of winning Flavia. A score of times, indeed, he had pictured, and with rapture, the inevitable collapse. In the visions of his head upon his bed he had seen the girl turn to him in the wreck of things — it might be to save her brother’s life, it might be to save her tender feet from the stones of foreign streets. And in the same dream he had seen himself standing by her, alone against the world; as, to do him justice, he would have stood, no matter how sharp the stress or great the cost.

  He had no doubt that he would be able to save her — in spite of herself and whatever her indiscretion. For he belonged to a class that has ever owned inordinate power in Ireland: the class of the middlemen with roots in either camp — a grandam, who, perchance, still softens her clay on the old cabin hearth, while a son preens it with his betters in Trinity College. Such men carry into the ruling ranks their knowledge of the modes of thought, the tricks and subterfuges of those from whom they spring; and at once astute and overbearing, hard and supple, turn the needs of rich and poor to their own advantage, and rise on the common loss. Asgill, with money to lend in the town, and protections to grant upon the bog, with the secrets of two worlds in his head or in his deed-box, could afford to await with confidence the day when the storm would break upon Morristown, and Flavia, in the ruin of all about her, would turn to him for rescue.

  Keen therefore was his chagrin when, through the underground channels which were in his power, he heard two days after the event, and in distant Tralee, what had happened. Some word of a large Spanish ship seen off the point had reached the mess-room; but only he knew how nearly work had been found for the garrison: only he, walking about with a smooth face, listened for the alarm that did not come. For a wonder he had been virtuous, he had given James his warning; yet he had seen cakes and ale in prospect. Now, not only was the treat vanished below the horizon, but stranger news, news still less welcome, was whispered in his ear. The man whom he had distrusted from the first, the man against whom he had warned The McMurrough, had done this. More, in spite of the line he had taken, the man was still at Morristown, if not honoured, protected, and if not openly triumphant, master in fact.

  Luke Asgill swore horribly. But Colonel Sullivan had got the better of him once, and he was not to be duped again by this Don Quixote’s mildness and love of peace. He knew him to be formidable, and he took time to consider before he acted. He waited a week and examined the matter on many sides before he took horse to see things with his own eyes. Nor did he alight at the gate of Morristown until he had made many a resolution to be wary and on his guard.

  He had reason to call these to mind before his foot was well out of the stirrup, for the first person he saw, after he had bidden his groom take the horses to the stable, was Colonel Sullivan. Asgill had time to scan his face before they met in the middle of the courtyard, the one entering, the other leaving; and he judged that Colonel John’s triumph did not go very deep. He was looking graver, sadder, older; finally — this he saw as they saluted one another — sterner.

  Asgill stepped aside courteously, meaning to go by him. But the Colonel stepped aside also, and so barred his way. “Mr. Asgill,” he said — and there was something of the martinet in his tone— “I will trouble you to give me a word apart.”

  “A word apart?” Asgill answered. He was taken aback, and do what he could the Colonel’s grave eyes discomposed him. “With all the pleasure in life, Colonel. But a little later, by your leave.”

  “I think now were more convenient, sir,” the Colonel answered, “by your leave.”

  “I will lay my cloak in the house, and then — —”

  “It will be more convenient to keep your cloak, I’m thinking,” the Colonel rejoined with dryness. And either because of the meaning in his voice or the command in his eyes, Asgill gave way and turned with him, and the two walked gravely and step for step through the gateway.

  Outside the Colonel beckoned to a ragged urc
hin who was playing ducks and drakes with his naked toes. “Go after Mr. Asgill’s horses,” he said, and bid the man bring them back.”

  “Colonel Sullivan!”

  The Colonel did not heed his remonstrance. “And follow us!” he continued. “Are you hearing, boy? Go then.”

  “Colonel Sullivan,” Asgill repeated, his face both darker and paler — for there could be no doubt about the other’s meaning— “I’m thinking this is a strange liberty you’re taking. And I beg to say I don’t understand the meaning of it.”

  “You wish to know the meaning of it?”

  “I do.”

  “It means, sir,” Colonel John replied, “that the sooner you start on your return journey the better!”

  Asgill stared. “The better you will be pleased, you mean!” he said. And he laughed harshly.

  “The better it will be for you, I mean,” Colonel John answered.

  Asgill flushed darkly, but he commanded himself — having those injunctions to prudence fresh in his mind. “This is an odd tone,” he said. “And I must ask you to explain yourself further, or I can tell you that what you have said will go for little. I am here upon the invitation of my friend, The McMurrough — —”

  “This is not his house.”

  Asgill stared. “Do you mean — —”

  “I mean what I say,” the Colonel answered. “This is not his house, as you well know.”

  “But — —”

  “It is mine, and I do not propose to entertain you, Mr. Asgill,” Colonel John continued. “Is that sufficiently plain?”

  The glove was down. The two men looked at one another, while the knot of beggars, gathered round the gate and just out of earshot, watched them — in the dark as to all else, but aware with Irish shrewdness that they were at grips. Asgill was not only taken by surprise, but he lay under the disadvantage of ignorance. He did not know precisely how things stood, much less could he explain this sudden attack. Yet if the tall, lean man, serious and growing grey, represented one form of strength, the shorter, stouter man, with the mobile face and the quick brain, stood for another. Offhand he could think of no weak spot on his side; and if he must fight, he would fight.