The Wild Geese Part 38

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 Asgill and the O'Beirnes--the smaller folk had withdrawn earlier--remained seated at the table, the young men scoffing at the Englishman's weak head, and his stiffness and conceit of himself, Asgill silent and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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 G.o.d, 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 gla.s.ses 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 att.i.tude--"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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 prost.i.tuted?

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 h.e.l.l. 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 trespa.s.s. 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 a.s.sure 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, antic.i.p.ating 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 a.s.suredly not one to despair lightly. But even he had succ.u.mbed 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 s.h.i.+ver 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 n.o.ble 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.