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 of Armida and The 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 fou
r 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.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 571