CHAPTER XX
AN UNWELCOME VISITOR
A little before sunset on that same day—almost precisely indeed at the moment at which Flavia's shadow darkened the splayed flank of the window in the Tower—two men stood beside the entrance at Morristown, whence the one's whip had just chased the beggars. They were staring at a third, who, seated nonchalantly upon the horse-block, slapped his boot with his riding switch, and made as poor a show of hiding his amusement as they of masking their disgust. The man who slapped his leg and shaped his lips to a silent whistle, was Major Payton of the —th. The men who looked at him, and cursed the unlucky star which had brought him thither, were Luke Asgill and The McMurrough.
"Faith, and I should have thought," Asgill said, with a clouded face, "that my presence here, Major, and I, a Justice——"
"True for you!" Payton said, with a grin.
"Should have been enough by itself, and the least taste more than enough, to prove the absurdity of the Castle's story."
"True for you again," Payton replied. "And ain't I saying that but for your presence here, and a friend at court that I'll not name, it's not your humble servant this gentleman would be entertaining"—he turned to The McMurrough—"but half a company and a sergeant's guard!"
"I'm allowing it."
"You've no cause to do other."
"Devil a bit I'm denying it," Asgill replied more amicably; and, as far as he could, he cleared his face. "It's not that you're not welcome. Not at all, Major! Sure, and I'll answer for it, my friend, The McMurrough is glad to welcome any English gentleman, much more one of your reputation."
"Truth, and I am," The McMurrough assented. But he had not Asgill's self-control, and his sulky tone belied his words.
"Still—I come at an awkward time, perhaps?" Payton answered, looking with a grin from one to the other.
For the first time it struck him that the suspicions at headquarters might be well-founded; in that case he had been rash to put his head in the lion's mouth. For it had been wholly his own notion. Partly to tease Asgill, whom he did not love the more because he owed him money, and partly to see the rustic beauty whom, rumour had it, Asgill was courting in the wilds—a little, too, because life at Tralee was dull, he had volunteered to do with three or four troopers what otherwise a half-company would have been sent to do. That he could at the same time put his creditor under an obligation, and annoy him, had not been the least part of the temptation; while no one at Tralee believed the story sent down from Dublin.
He did not credit it even now for more than two seconds. Then common sense, and his knowledge of Luke Asgill reassured him. "Eh! An awkward time, perhaps?" he repeated, looking at The McMurrough. "Sorry, I'm sure, but——"
"I'd have entertained you better, I'm thinking," James McMurrough said, "if I'd known you were coming before you came."
"Devil a doubt of it!" said Asgill, whose subtle brain had been at work. "Not that it matters, bedad, for an Irish gentleman will do his best. And to-morrow Colonel Sullivan, that's more knowledge of the mode and foreign ways, will be back, and he'll be helping his cousin. More by token," he added, in a different tone, "you know him of old?"
Payton, who had frowned at the name, reddened at the question. "Is that," he asked, "the Colonel Sullivan who——"
"Who tried the foils with Lemoine at Tralee?" Asgill cried heartily. "The same and no other! He is away to-day, but he'll be returning tomorrow, and he'll be delighted to see you! And by good luck, there are foils in the house, and he'll pass the time pleasantly with you! It's he's the hospitable creature!"
Payton was far from pleased. He was anything but anxious to see the man whose skill had turned the joke against him; and his face betokened his feelings. Had he foreseen the meeting he would certainly have remained in Tralee, and left the job to a subaltern. "Hang it!" he exclaimed, vexed by the recollection, "a fine mess you led me into there, Asgill!"
"I did not know him then," Asgill replied lightly. "And, pho! Take my word for it, he's no man to bear malice!"
"Malice, begad!" Payton answered, ill-humouredly; "I think it's I——"
"Ah, you are right again, to be sure!" Asgill agreed, laughing silently. For already he had formed a hope that the guest might be manœuvred out of the house on the morrow. Not that he thought Payton was likely either to discover the Colonel's plight, or to interfere if he did. But Asgill had another, and a stronger motive for wishing the intruder away. He knew Payton. He knew the man's arrogance and insolence, the contempt in which he held the Irish, his view of them as an inferior race. And he was sure that, if he saw Flavia and fancied her—and who that saw her would not fancy her?—he was capable of any rudeness, any outrage; or, if he learned her position in regard to the estate, he might prove a formidable, if an honourable, competitor. In either case, to hasten the man's departure, and to induce Flavia to remain in the background in the meantime, became Asgill's chief aim.
James McMurrough, on the other hand, saw in the unwelcome intruder an English officer; and, troubled by his guilty conscience, he dreaded above all things what he might discover. True, the past was past, the plot spent, the Spanish ship gone. But the Colonel remained, and in durance. And if by any chance the Englishman stumbled on him, released him and heard his story, and lived to carry it back to Tralee—the consequences might be such that a cold sweat broke out on the young man's brow at the thought of them. To add to his alarm, Payton, whose mind was secretly occupied with the Colonel, sought to evince his indifference by changing the subject, and in doing so, hit on one singularly unfortunate.
"A pretty fair piece of water," he said, rising with an affected yawn, and pointing over the lake with his riding-switch. "The tower at the head of it—it's grown too dark to see it—is it inhabited?"
The McMurrough started guiltily. "The tower?" he stammered. Could it be that the man knew all, and was here to expose him? His heart stood still, then raced.
"The Major'll be meaning the tower on the rock," Asgill said smoothly, but with a warning look. "Ah, sure, it'll be used at times, Major, for a prison, you understand."
"Oh!"
"But we'll be better to be moving inside, I'm thinking," he continued.
Payton assented. He was still brooding on his enemy, the Colonel, and his probable arrival on the morrow. Curse the man, he was thinking. Why couldn't he keep out of his way?
"Take the Major in, McMurrough," Asgill said, who on his side was on tenter-hooks lest Flavia and Morty O'Beirne should arrive from the Tower. "You'll like to get rid of your boots before supper, Major?" he went on. "Bid Darby send the Major's man to him, McMurrough; or, better, I'll be going to the stables myself and I'll be telling him!"
As the others went in, Asgill strolled on this pretext towards the stables. But when they had passed out of sight he turned and walked along the lake to meet the girl and her companion. As he walked he had time to think, and to decide how he might best deal with Flavia, and how much and what he should tell her. When he met them, therefore—by this time the night was falling—his first question related to their errand, and to that which an hour before had been the one pre-occupation of all their minds.
"Well," he said, "he'll not have yielded yet, I am thinking?"
Dark as it was, the girl averted her face to hide the trouble in her eyes. She shook her head. "No," she said, "he has not."
"I did not count on it," Asgill replied cheerfully. "But time—time and hunger and patience—devil a doubt he'll give in presently."
She did not answer, but he fancied—she kept her face averted—that she shivered.
"While you have been away, something has happened," he continued. After all, it was perhaps as well, he reflected, that Payton had come. His coming, even if Flavia did not encounter him, would divert her thoughts, would suggest an external peril, would prevent her dwelling too long or too fancifully on that room in the Tower, and on the man who famished there. She hated the Colonel, Asgill believed. She had hated him, he was sure. But how long would she continue to hate him in these circumstances? How long if she learned what were the Colonel's feelings towards her? "An unwelcome guest has come," he continued glibly, "and one that'll be giving trouble, I'm fearing."
"A guest?" Flavia repeated in astonishment. She halted. What time for guests was this? "And unwelcome?" she added. "Who is it?"
"An English officer," Asgill explained, "from Tralee. He is saying that the Castle has heard something, and has sent him here to look about him."
Naturally the danger seemed greater to the two than to Asgill, who knew his man. Words of dismay broke from Flavia and O'Beirne. "From Tralee?" she cried. "And an English officer? Good heavens! Do you know him?"
"I do," Asgill answered confidently. "And, believe me or no, I can manage him." He began to appreciate this opportunity of showing himself the master of the position. "I hold him, like that, not the least doubt of it; but the less we'll be doing for him the sooner he'll be going, and the safer we'll be! I would not be so bold as to advise," he continued diffidently, "but I'm thinking it would be no worse if you left him to be entertained by the men."
"I will!" she cried, embracing the idea. "Why should I be wanting to see him?"
"Then I think he'll be ordering his horse to-morrow!"
"I wish he were gone now!" she cried.
"Ah, so do I!" he replied, from his heart.
"I will go in through the garden," she said.
He assented; it was to that point he had been moving. She turned aside, and for a moment he bent to the temptation to go with her. Since the day on which he had voluntarily left the house at the Colonel's dictation he had made progress in her favour. He was sure that he had come closer to her—that she had begun not only to suffer his company, but to suffer it willingly. And here, as she passed through the darkling garden under the solid blackness of the yews, was an opportunity of making a further advance. She would have to grope her way, a reason for taking her hand might offer, and—his head grew hot at the thought.
But he thrust the temptation from him. He knew that it was not only the stranger's presence that weighed her down, but her recollection of the man in the Tower and his miserable plight. This was not the time, nor was she in the mood for such advances; and, putting pressure on himself, Asgill turned from her, satisfied with what he had done.
As he went on with Morty, he gave him a hint to say as little in Payton's presence as possible, and to leave the management to him. "I know the man," he explained, "and where he's weak. I'm for seeing the back of him as soon as we can, but without noise."
"There's always the bog," grumbled Morty. He did not love Asgill overmuch, and the interview with the Colonel had left him in a restive mood.
"And the garrison at Tralee," Asgill rejoined drily, "to ask where he is! And his troopers to answer the question."
Morty fell back on sullenness, and bade him manage it his own way. "Only I'll trouble you not to blame me," he added, "if the English soger finds the Colonel, and ruins us entirely!"
"I'll not," Asgill answered pithily, "if so be you'll hold your tongue."
So at supper that night Payton looked in vain for the Kerry beauty whose charms the warmer wits of the mess had more than once painted in hues rather florid than fit. Lacking her, he found that the conversation lay wholly between Asgill and himself. Nor did this surprise him, when he had surmounted his annoyance at the young lady's absence; for the contempt in which he held 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 ofArmidaandThe 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!"
She did not answer. And outwardly she was not much moved. But inwardly, the horror of herself and her part in the matter, which she had felt as she lay upstairs in the darkness, thinking of the starving man, whelmed up and choked her. They were using her for this! They were using her because the man—loved her! Because hard words, cruel treatment, brutality from her would be ten times more hard, more cruel, more brutal than from others! Because such treatment at her hands would be more likely to break his spirit and crush his heart! To what viler use, to what lower end could a woman be used, or human feeling be prostituted?
Nor was this all. On the tide of this loathing of herself rose another, a newer and a stranger feeling. The man loved her. She did not doubt the statement. Its truth came home to her at once, although, occupied with other views of him, she had never suspected the fact. And because it placed him in a different light, because it placed him in a light in which she had never viewed him before, because it recalled a hundred things, acts, words on his part which she had barely noted at the time, but which now took on another aspect, it showed him, too, as one whom she had never seen. Had he been free at this moment, prosperous, triumphant, the knowledge that he loved her, that he, her enemy, loved her, might have revolted her—she might have hated him the more for it. But now that he lay a prisoner, famished, starving, the fact that he loved her touched her heart, transfixed her with an almost poignant feeling, choked her with a rising flood of pity and self-reproach.
"So there you have it, Flavvy!" James cried complacently. "And sure, you'll not be making a fool of yourself at this time of day!"
She stood as one stunned; looking at him with strange eyes, thinking, not answering. Asgill, and Asgill only, saw a burning blush dye for an instant the whiteness of her face. He, and he only, discovered, with the subtle insight of one who loved, a part of what she was thinking. He wished James McMurrough in the depth of hell. But it was too late, or he feared so.
Great was his relief, therefore, when she spoke. "Then you'll not—be going now?" she said.
"Now?" James retorted contemptuously. "Haven't I told you, you'll go to-morrow?"
"If I must," she said slowly, "I will—if I must."
"Then what's the good of talking, I'm thinking?" The McMurrough answered. And he was going on—being in a bullying mood—to say more in the same strain, when the opportunity was taken from him. One of the O'Beirnes, who happened to avert his eyes from the girl, discovered Payton standing at the foot of the stairs. Phelim's exclamation apprised the others that something was amiss, and they turned.
"I left my snuff-box on the table," Payton said, with a sly grin. How much he had heard they could not tell. "Ha! there it is! Thank you. Sorry! Sorry, I am sure! Hope I don't trespass. Will you present me to your sister, Mr. McMurrough?"
James McMurrough had no option but to do so—looking foolish; while Luke Asgill stood by with rage in his heart, cursing the evil chance which had brought Flavia downstairs.
"I assure you," Payton said, bowing low before her, but not so low that the insolence of his smile was hidden from all, "I think myself happy. My friend Asgill's picture of you, warmly as he painted it, fell infinitely—infinitely below the reality!"
CHAPTER XXI
THE KEY
Colonel John rose and walked unsteadily to the window. He rested a hand on either jamb and looked through it, peering to right and left with wistful eyes. He detected no one, nothing, no change, no movement, and, with a groan, he straightened himself. But he still continued to look out, gazing at the bare sward below the window, at the sparkling sheet of water beyond and beneath it, at the pitiless blue sky above, in which the sun was still high, though it had begun to decline.
Presently he grew weary, and went back to his chair. He sat down with his elbows on his knees and his head between his hands. Again his ears had deceived him! Again hope had told her flattering tale! How many more times would he start to his feet, fancying he heard the footstep that did not fall, calling aloud to those who were not there, anticipating those who, more hard of heart than the stone walls about him, more heedless than the pitiless face of nature without, would not come before the appointed time! And that was hours away, hours of thirst and hunger, almost intolerable; of patience and waiting, weary waiting, broken only by such a fancy, born of his weakened senses, as had just drawn him to the window.
The suffering which is inevitable is more easy to bear than that which is caused by man. In the latter case the sense that the misery felt may be ended by so small a thing as another's will; that another may, by lifting a finger, cut it short, and will not; that to persuade him is all that is needful—this becomes at the last maddening, intolerable, a thing to upset the reason, if that other will not be persuaded.
Colonel John was a man sane and well-balanced, and assuredly not one to despair lightly. But even he had succumbed more than once during the last twelve hours to gusts of rage, provoked as much by the futility of his suffering as by the cruelty of his persecutors. After each of these storms he had laughed, in wonder at himself, had scolded himself and grown calm. But they had made their mark upon him, they had left his eyes wilder, his cheeks more hollow; his hand less firm.
He had burned, in fighting the cold of the past night, all that would burn, except the chair on which he sat; and with the dawn the last spark of his fire had died out. Notwithstanding those fits of rage he was not light-headed. He could command his faculties at will, he could still reflect and plan, marshal the arguments and perfect the reasons that must convince his foes, that, if they inflicted a lingering death on him, they did but work their own undoing. But at times he found himself confounding the present with the past, fancying, for a while, that he was in a Turkish prison, and turning, under that impression, to address Bale; or starting from a waking dream of some cold camp in Russian snows—alas! starting from it only to shiver with that penetrating, heart-piercing, frightful cold, which was worse to bear than the gnawing of hunger or the longing of thirst.
He had not eaten for more than seventy hours. But the long privation which had weakened his limbs and blanched his cheeks, which had even gone some way towards disordering his senses, had not availed to shake his will. The possibility of surrender did not occur to him, partly because he felt sure that James McMurrough would not be so foolish as to let him die; but partly, also, by reason of a noble stubbornness in the man, a fixedness that for no pain of death would leave a woman or a child to perish. More than once Colonel Sullivan had had to make that choice, amid the horrors of a retreat across famished lands, with wolves and Cossacks on his skirts; and perhaps the choice then made had become a habit of the mind. At any rate, whether that were the cause or no, in this new phase he gave no thought to yielding.
He had sat for some minutes in the attitude of depression, or bodily weakness, which has, been described, when once more a sound startled him. He raised his head and turned his eyes, sharpened by hunger, on the window. But this time, distrusting his senses, he did not rise until the sound was repeated. Then he faltered to his feet, and once again went unsteadily to the window, and, leaning a hand on each jamb, looked out.
At the same moment Flavia looked in. Their eyes met. Their faces were less than a yard apart.
The girl started back with a low cry, caused either by alarm on finding him so near her or by horror at the change in his aspect. If the latter, there was abundant cause. For she had left him hungry, she found him starving; she had left him haggard, she found him with eyes unnaturally large, his temples hollow, his lips dry, his chin unshaven. It was indeed a mask rather than a face, a staring mask of famine, that looked out of the dusky room at her, and looked not the less pitifully, not the less wofully, because, as soon as its owner took in her identity, the mask tried to smile.
"Mother of God!" she whispered. Her face had grown nearly as white as his. "O Mother of God!" She had imagined nothing like this.
And Colonel John, believing—his throat was so dry that he could not speak at once—that he read pity as well as horror in her face, felt a sob rise in his breast. He tried to smile the more bravely for that, and presently he found his voice, a queer, husky voice.
"You must not leave me—too long," he said. His smile was becoming ghastly.
She drew in her breath, and averted her face, to hide, he hoped, the effect of the sight upon her. Or perhaps—for he saw her shudder—she was mutely calling the sunlit lake on which her eyes rested, the blue sky, the smiling summer scene, to witness against this foul cruelty, this dark wickedness.
But it seemed that he deceived himself. For when she turned her face to him again, though it was still colourless, it was hard and set.
"You must sign," she said. "You must sign the paper."
His parched lips opened, but he did not answer. He was as one struck dumb.
"You must sign!" she repeated insistently. "Do you hear? You must sign!"
Still he did not answer; he only looked at her with eyes of infinite reproach. The pity of it! The pity of it! She, a woman, a girl, whom compassion should have constrained, whose tender heart should have bled for him, could see him tortured, could aid in the work, and cry "Sign!"
She could indeed, for she repeated the word—fiercely, feverishly. "Sign!" she cried. And then, "If you will," she said, "I will give you—see! See! You shall have this. You shall eat and drink; only sign! For God's sake, sign what they want, and eat and drink!"
And, with fingers that trembled with haste, she drew from a hiding-place in her cloak, bread and milk and wine. "See what I have brought," she continued, holding them before his starting eyes, his cracking lips, "if you will sign."
He gazed at them, at her, with anguish of the mind as well as of the body. How he had mistaken her! How he had misread her! Then, with a groan, "God forgive you!" he cried, "I cannot! I cannot!"
"You will not sign?" she retorted.
"Cannot, and will not!" he said.
"And why? Why will you not?"
On that his patience, sorely tried, gave way; and, swept along by one of those gusts of rage, he spoke. "Why?" he cried in hoarse accents. "You ask me why? Because, ungrateful, unwomanly, miserable as you are—I will not rob you or the dead! Because I will not be false to an old man's trust! I will not give to the forsworn what was meant for the innocent—nor sell my honour for a drink of water! Because,"—he laughed a half-delirious laugh—"there is nothing to sign, nothing! I have burned your parchments these two days, and if you tempt me two more days, if you make me suffer twice as much as I have suffered, you can do nothing! If your heart be as hard as—it is, you can do nothing!" He held out hands which trembled with passion. "You can do nothing!" he repeated. "Neither you, who—God forgive you, are no woman, have no woman's heart, no woman's pity!—nor he who would have killed me in the bog to gain that which he now starves me to get! But I foiled him then, as I will foil him to-day, ingrate, perjured, accursed, as he is, accursed——"
He faltered and was silent, steadying himself by resting one hand against the wall. For a moment he covered his eyes with the other hand. Then "God forgive me!" he resumed in a lower tone, "I know not what I say! God forgive me! And you—Go! for you too—God forgive you—know not what you do. You do not know what it is to hunger and thirst, or you would not try me thus! Nor do you know what you were to me, or you would not try me thus! Yet I ought to remember that—that it is not for yourself you do it!"
He turned his back on her then, and on the window. He had taken three steps towards the middle of the room, when she cried, "Wait!"
"Go!" he repeated with a backward gesture of the hand. "Go! and God forgive you, as I do!"
"Wait!" she cried. "And take them! Oh, take them! Quick!" He turned about slowly, almost with suspicion. She was holding the food and the drink through the window, holding them out for him to take. But it might be another deception. He was not sure, and for a moment a cunning look gleamed in his eyes, and he took a step in a stealthy fashion towards the window, as if, were she off her guard, he would snatch them from her. But she cried again, "Take them! Take them!" with tears in her voice. "I brought them for you. May God indeed forgive me!"
The craving was so strong upon him that he took them then without a word, without answering her or thanking her. He turned his back on her, as soon as he had possessed himself of them, as if he dared not let her see the desire in his face; and standing thus, he drew the stopper from the bottle of milk, and drank. He would fain have held the bottle to his lips until he had drained the last drop: but he controlled himself, and when he had swallowed a few mouthfuls, he removed it. Then, with the solemnity of a sacrament, perhaps with the feeling that should attend one, he broke off three or four small fragments of the bread, and ate them one by one and slowly—the first with difficulty, the second more easily, the third with an avidity which he checked only by a firm effort of the will. "Presently!" he told himself. "Presently! There is plenty, there is plenty." Yet he allowed himself two more mouthfuls of bread and another sip of milk—milk that was nectar, rather than any earthly drink his lips had ever encountered.
At length, with new life running in his veins, and not new life only, but a pure thankfulness that she had proved herself very woman at the last, he laid his treasures on the chair, and turned to her. She was gone.
His face fell. For while he had eaten and drunk he had felt her presence at his back, and once he was sure that he had heard her sob. But she was gone. A chill fell upon his spirits. Yet she might not be gone far. He staggered—for he was not yet steady on his feet—to the window, and looked to right and left.
She had not gone far. She was lying prone on the sward, her face hidden on her arms; and it was true that he had heard her sob, for she was weeping without restraint. The change in him, the evidence of suffering which she had read in his face, to say nothing of his reproaches, had done something more than shock her. They had opened her eyes to the true nature—already dimly seen—of the plan to which she had lent herself. They had torn the last veil from the selfishness of those with whom she had acted, their cupidity and their ruthlessness. And they had shown the man himself in a light so new and startling, that even the last twenty-four hours had not prepared her for it. The scales of prejudice which had dimmed her sight fell at length, and wholly, from her eyes; and, for the first time, she saw him as he was. For the first time she perceived that, in pursuing the path he had followed, he might have thought himself right; he might have been moved by a higher motive than self-interest, he might have been standing for others rather than for himself. Parts of the passionate rebuke which suffering and indignation had forced from him remained branded upon her memory; and she wept in shame, feeling her helplessness, her ignorance, her inexperience, feeling that she had no longer any sure support or prop. For how could she trust those who had drawn her into this hideous, this cruel business? Who, taking advantage at once of her wounded vanity, and her affection for her brother, had led her to this act, from which she now shrank in abhorrence?
There was only, of all about her, Uncle Ulick to whom she could turn, or on whom she could depend. And he, though he would not have stooped to this, was little better, she knew, than a broken reed. The sense of her loneliness, the knowledge that those about her used her for their own ends—and those the most unworthy—overwhelmed her; and in proportion as she had been proud and self-reliant, was her present abasement.
When the first passion of self-reproach had spent itself, she heard him calling her by name, and in a voice that stirred her heart-strings. She rose, first to her knees and then to her feet, and, averting her face, "I will open the door," she said, humbly and in a broken voice. "I have brought the key."
He did not answer, and she did not unlock. For as, still keeping her face averted that he might not see her tears, she turned the corner of the Tower to gain the door, her brother's head and shoulders rose above the level of the platform. As The McMurrough stepped on to the latter from the path, he was in time to see her skirt vanishing. He saw no more. But his suspicions were aroused. He strode across the face of the Tower, turned the corner, and came on her in the act of putting the key in the lock.
"What are you doing?" he cried, in a terrible voice. "Are you mad?"
She did not answer, but neither did he pause for her answer. The imminence of the peril, the thought that the man whom he had so deeply wronged, and who knew him for the perjured thing he was, might in another minute be free—free to take what steps he pleased, free to avenge himself and punish his foes, rose up before him, and he thrust her roughly from the door. The key, not yet turned, came away in her hand, and he tried to snatch it from her.
"Give it me!" he cried. "Do you hear? Give it me!"
"I will not!" she cried. "No!"
"Give it up, I say!" he retorted. And this time he made good his hold on her wrist. He tried to force the key from her. "Let it go!" he panted, "or I shall hurt you!"
But he made a great mistake if he thought that he could coerce Flavia in that way. Her fingers only closed more tightly on the key. "Never!" she cried, struggling with him. "Never! I am going to let him out!"
"You coward!" a voice cried through the door. "Coward! Coward!" There was a sound of drumming on the door.
But Colonel John's voice and his blows were powerless to help, as James, in a frenzy of rage and alarm, gripped the girl's wrist, and twisted it. "Let it go! Let it go, you fool!" he cried brutally, "or I will break your arm!"
Her face turned white with pain, but for a moment she endured in silence. Then a shriek escaped her.
It was answered instantly. Neither he nor she had had eyes for aught but one another; and the hand that fell, and fell heavily, on James's shoulder was as unexpected as a thunderbolt.
"By Heaven, man," a voice cried in his ear. "Are you mad? Or is this the way you treat women in Kerry? Let the lady go! Let her go, I say!"
The command was needless, for at the first sound of the voice James had fallen back with a curse, and Flavia, grasping her bruised wrist with her other hand, reeled for support against the Tower wall. For a moment no one spoke. Then James, with scarcely a look at Payton—for he it was—bade her come away with him. "If you are not mad," he growled, "you'll have a care! You'll have a care, and come away, girl!"
"When I have let him out, I will," she answered, her eyes glowing sombrely as she nursed her wrist. In her, too, the old Adam had been raised.
"Give me the key!" he said for the last time.
"I will not," she said. "And if I did—" she continued, with a glance at Payton that reminded the unhappy McMurrough that, with the secret known, the key was no longer of use—"if I did, how would it serve you?"
The McMurrough turned his rage upon the intruder. "Devil take you, what business will it be of yours?" he cried. "Who are you to come between us, eh?"
Payton bowed. "If I offend," he said airily, "I am entirely at your service." He tapped the hilt of his sword. "You do not wear one, but I have no doubt you can use one. I shall be happy to give you satisfaction where and when you please. A time and place——"
But James did not stop to hear him out. He turned with an oath and a snarl, and went off—went off in such a manner that Flavia could not but see that the challenge was not to his taste. At another time she would have blushed for him. But his brutal violence had done more during the last ten minutes to depose his image from her heart than years of neglect and rudeness.
Payton saw him go, and, blessing the good fortune which had put him in a position to command the beauty's thanks, he turned to receive them. But Flavia was not looking at him, was not thinking of him. She had put the key in the lock and was trying to turn it. Her left wrist, however, was too weak, and the right was so strained as to be useless. She signed to him to turn the key, and he did so, and threw open the door, wondering much who was there and what it was all about.
He did not at once recognise the man who, pale and haggard, a mere ghost of himself, dragged himself up the three steps, and, exhausted by the effort, leant against the doorpost. But when Colonel John spoke and tried to thank the girl, he knew him.
He whistled. "You are Colonel Sullivan!" he said.
"The same, sir!" Colonel John murmured mechanically.
"Are you ill?"
"I am not well," the other replied with a sickly smile. The indignation which he had felt during the contest between the girl and her brother had been too much for his strength. "I shall be better presently," he added. He closed his eyes.
"We should be getting him below," Flavia said in an undertone.
Payton looked from one to the other. He was in a fog. "Has he been here long?" he asked.
"Nearly four days," she replied, with a shiver.
"And nothing to eat?"
"Nothing."
"The devil! And why?"
She did not stay to think how much it was wise to tell him. In her repentant mood she was anxious to pour herself out in self-reproach. "We wanted him to convey some property," she said, "as we wished."
"To your brother?"
"Ah, to him!" Then, seeing his astonishment, "It was mine," she added.
Payton knew that estates were much held in trust in that part, and he began to understand. He looked at her; but no, he did not understand now. For if the idea had been to constrain Colonel Sullivan to transfer her property to her brother, how did her interest match with that? He could only suppose that her brother had coerced her, and that she had given him the slip and tried to release the man—with the result he had witnessed.
One thing was clear. The property, large or small, was still hers. The Major looked with a thoughtful face at the smiling valley, with its cabins scattered over the slopes, at the lake and the fishing-boats, and the rambling slate-roofed house with its sheds and peat-stacks. He wondered.
No more was said at that moment, however, for Flavia saw that Colonel Sullivan's strength was not to be revived in an hour. He must be assisted to the house and cared for there. But in the meantime, and to lend some strength, she was anxious to give him such wine and food as he could safely take. To procure these she entered the room in which he had been confined.
As she cast her eyes round its dismal interior, marked the poor handful of embers that told of his long struggle with the cold, marked the one chair which he had saved—for to lie on the floor had been death—marked the beaten path that led from the chair to the window, and spoke of many an hour of painful waiting and of hope deferred, she saw the man in another, a more gentle, a more domestic aspect. She had seen the heroism, she now saw the pathos of his conduct, and tears came afresh to her eyes. "For me!" she murmured. "For me! And how had I treated him!"
Her old grievance against him was forgotten, wiped out of remembrance by his sufferings. She dwelt only on the treatment she had meted out to him.
When they had given him to eat and drink he assured them, smiling, that he could walk. But when he attempted to do so he staggered. "He will need a stronger arm than yours," Payton said, with a grin. "May I offer mine?"
For the first time she looked at him gratefully "Thank you," she said.
"I can walk," the Colonel repeated obstinately. "A little giddy, that is all." But in the end he needed all the help that both could give him. And so it happened that a few minutes later Luke Asgill, standing at the entrance to the courtyard, a little anxious indeed, but aware of no immediate danger, looked along the road, and saw the three approaching, linked in apparent amity.
The shock was great, for James McMurrough had fled, cursing, into solitude and the hills, taking no steps to warn his ally. The sight, thus unforeseen, struck Asgill with the force of a bullet. Colonel John released, and in the company of Flavia and Payton! All his craft, all his coolness forsook him. He slunk out of sight by a back way, but not before Payton had marked his retreat.