23. Behind The Yews
Under the sky the pale softness of dawn had yielded place to the sun in his strength--in more poetical words, Aurora had given way to Phoebus--but within, the passages were still grey and chill, and silent as though night's ghostly sentinels still walked them, when one of the bedchamber doors opened and a face peeped out. The face was Flavia's. The girl was too young, too full of life and vigour, to be altered by a single sleepless night, but the cold reflection of the whitewashed walls did that which watching had failed to do. It robbed her eyes of their brightness, her face of its colour, her hair of its lustre. She stood an instant, and gazed, frowning, at the doors that, in a row and all alike, hid nevertheless one a hope, and another a fear, and a third perhaps a tragedy. But drab, silent, closed, each within a shadow of its own, they told nothing. Presently the girl stepped forward--paused, scared by a board that creaked under her naked foot--then went on again. She stood now at one of the doors, and scratched on it with her nail.
No one answered the summons, and she pushed the door open and went in. And, as she had feared, enlightened by Asgill's hint and by what she had seen of her brother's conduct earlier in the day, she found. James was awake--wide awake--and sitting up in his bed, his arms clasped about his knees. His eyes met hers as she entered, and in his eyes, and in his form, huddled together as in sheer physical pain, she read beyond all doubt, beyond all mistake--fear. Why she had felt certain, courageous herself, that this was what she would find, she did not know. But there it was, as Asgill had foretold it, and as she had foreseen it, through the long, restless, torturing hours; as she had seen it, and now denied it, now, with a sick heart, owned its reality.
James tried to utter the oath that, deceiving her, might rid him of her presence. But his nerves, shaken by his overnight drink, could not command his voice even for that. His eyes dropped in shame, the muttered "What the plague will you be wanting at this hour?" was no more than a querulous whisper.
"I couldn't sleep," she said, avoiding his eyes.
"I, no more," he muttered. "Curse him! Curse him! Curse you, too! Why were you getting in his way? You've as good as murdered me with your tricks and your poses!"
"God forbid!" she exclaimed.
"Ah, you have!" he answered, rocking himself to and fro in his excitement. "If it were any one else, I'm as ready to fight as another! And why not? But he's killed four men, and he'll kill me! Oh, the differ, if I'd not come up at that minute! If I'd not come up at that minute!"
The picture of what he would have escaped had he mounted the stairs a minute later, of what he had brought on himself by mounting a moment earlier, was too much for him. Not a thought did he give to what might have happened to her had he come on the scene later; but, with all his cowardly soul laid bare, he rocked himself to and fro in a paroxysm of self-pity.
Yet he did not suffer more sorely, he did not wince more tenderly under the lash of his own terrors, than Flavia suffered; than she winced, seeing him thus, seeing at last her idol as he was--the braggadocio stripped from him, and the poor, cringing creature displayed. If her pride of race--and the fabled Wicklow kings, of whom she came, were often in her mind--if that pride needed correction, she had it here. If she had thought too much of her descent--and the more in proportion as fortune had straitened the line, and only in this corner of a downtrodden land was its greatness even a memory--she was chastened for it now! She suffered for it now! She could have wept tears of shame. And yet, so plain was the collapse of the man before her, and so futile words, that she did not think of reproach; even had she found heart to chide him, knowing that her words might send him to his death.
All her thought was, could she hide the blot? Could she mask the shame? Could she, at any rate, so veil it that this insolent Englishman, this bully of the conquering race, might not perceive it? That were worth so much that her own life, on this summer morning, seemed a small price to pay for it.
But, alas! she could not purchase it with her life. Only in fairy tales can the woman pass for the man, and Doris receive in her tender bosom the thrust intended for the sterner breast. Then how? How could they shun at least open disgrace, open dishonour? For it needed but a glance at her brother's pallid face and wandering eye to assure her that, brought to the test, he would flinch; that, brought to the field, he would prove unequal even to the task of cloaking his fears.
She sickened at the thought, and her eyes grew hard. Was this the man in whom she had believed? And when, presently, he turned on his side and hid his face in the pillow and groaned, she had small pity to spare for him. "Are you not well?" she asked.
"Can't you be seeing?" he answered fractiously; but for very shame he could not face her eyes. "Cannot you be seeing I am not fit to get up, let alone be meeting that devil? See how my hand shakes!"
"What is to be done, then?"
He cursed Payton thrice in a frenzy of rage. He beat the pillow with his fist.
"That does no good," she said.
"I believe you want to kill me!" he retorted, with childish passion. "I believe you want to see me dead! Why can't you be managing your own affairs, without--without----Oh, my God!" And then, in a dreadful voice, "My God, I shall be dead to-night! I shall be dead to-night! And you care nothing!"
He hid unmanly tears on his pillow, while she looked at the wall, pale to the lips and cut to the heart. Her worst misgivings, even those nightmare fears which haunt the dawn, had not pictured a thing so mean as this, a heart so low, a spirit so poor. And this was her brother, her idol, the last of the McMurroughs of Morristown, he to whom she had fondly looked to revive the glories of the race! Truly she had not understood him, or others. She had been blind indeed, blind, blind!
She had spoken to Luke Asgill the night before. He guessed, if he did not know the worst, and he would help her, she believed. But for that she would have turned, as her thoughts did turn, to Colonel John. But he lay prostrate, and, if she could have brought herself to go to him, he was in no state to give aid. The O'Beirnes were out of the question; she could not tell them. Youth has no pity, makes no allowance, expects the utmost, and a hundred times they had heard James brag and brawl. They would not understand, they would not believe. And Uncle Ulick was away.
There remained only Luke Asgill, who had offered his help.
"If you are not well," she said, in the same hard voice, "shall I be telling Mr. Asgill? He may contrive something."
The man cringing in the bed leapt at the hope, as he would have leapt at any hope. Nor was he so bemused by fear as not to reflect that, whatever Flavia asked, Asgill would do. "Ah, tell him," he cried, raising himself on his elbow. "Do you be telling him! He can make him--wait, may be."
At that moment she came near to hating her brother. "I will send him to you," she said.
"No!" he cried anxiously. "No! Do you be telling him! You tell him! Do you hear? I'm not so well to see him."
She shivered, seeing plainly the cowardice, the unmixed selfishness of the course he urged. But she had not the heart to answer him. She went from the room without another word, and, going back to her own chamber, she dressed. By this time it wanted not much of seven. The house was astir, the June sunshine was pouring with the songs of birds through the windows, she heard one of the O'Beirnes stumble downstairs. Next Asgill opened his door and passed down. In a twinkling she slipped out and followed him. At the bottom of the staircase he turned, hearing her footstep behind him, but she made a sign to him to go on, and led him into the open air. Nor when they were outside did she speak until she had put the courtyard between herself and the house.
For she would have hidden their shame from all if she could! Even to say what she had to say to one, and though he already guessed the truth, cost her in pain and humiliation more than her brother had paid for aught in his selfish life. But it had to be said, and, after a pause, and with eyes averted, "My brother is ill," she faltered. "He cannot meet--that man, this morning. It is--as you feared. And--what can we do?"
In another case Luke Asgill would have blessed the chance that linked him with her, that wrought a tie between them, and cast her on his help. But he had guessed, before she opened her mouth, what she had to say--nay, for hours he had lain sleepless on his bed, with eyes staring into the darkness, anticipating it. He had been certain of the issue--he knew James McMurrough; and, being a man who loved Flavia indeed, but loved life also, he had foreseen, with the cold sweat on his brow, what he would be driven to do.
He made no haste to answer, therefore, and his tone, when he did answer, was dull and lifeless. "Is it ill he is?" he said. "It's a bad morning to be ill, and a meeting on hand."
She did not answer.
"Is he too bad to stand?" he continued. He made no attempt to hide his comprehension or his scorn.
"I don't say that," she faltered.
"Perhaps he told you," Asgill said--and there was nothing of the lover in his tone--"to speak to me?"
She nodded.
"It is I am to--put it off, I suppose?"
"If it be possible," she cried. "Oh, if it be possible! Is it?"
He stood, thinking, with a gloomy face. From the first he had seen that there were two ways only of extricating The McMurrough. The one by a mild explanation, which would leave his honour in the mud. The other by an explanation after a different fashion,
vi et armis, vehementer, with the word "liar" ready to answer to the word "coward." But he who gave this last explanation must be willing and able to back the word with the deed, and stop cavilling with the sword-point.
Now, Asgill knew the Major's skill with the sword; none better. And under other circumstances the Justice--cold, selfish, scheming--would have gone many a mile about before he entered upon a quarrel with him. None the less, love and much night-thinking had drawn him to contemplate this very thing. For surely, if he did this and lived, Flavia would smile on him. Surely, if he saved her brother's honour, or came as near to saving it as driving the foul word down his opponent's throat could bring him, she would be won. It was a forlorn, it was a desperate expedient. For no worldly fortune, for no other advantage, would Luke Asgill have faced the Major's sword-point. But, whatever he was, he loved. He loved! And for the face and the form beside him, and for the quality of soul within them that shone from the girl's eyes, and made her what she was, and to him different from all other women, he had made up his mind to run the risk.
It went for something in his decision that he believed that Flavia, if he failed her, would go to the one person in the house who had no cause to fear Payton--to Colonel Sullivan. If she did that, Asgill was sure that his own chance was at an end. This was his chance. It lay with him now, to-day, at this moment--to dare or to retire, to win her favour at the risk of his life, or to yield her to another. In the chill morning hour he had discovered that the choice lay before him, that he must risk all or lose all: and he had decided. That decision he now announced.
"I will make it possible," he said slowly, questioning in his mind whether he could make terms with her--whether he dared make terms with her. "I will make it possible," he repeated, still more slowly, and with his eyes fixed on her face.
"If you could!" she cried, clasping her hands.
"I will!" he said, a sullen undertone in his voice. His eyes still dwelt darkly on her. "If he raises an objection, I will fight him--myself!"
She shrank from him. "Ah, but I can't ask that!" she cried, trembling.
"It is that or nothing."
"That or----"
"There is no other way," he said. He spoke with the same ungraciousness; for, try as he would, and though the habit and the education of a life cried to him to treat with her and make conditions, he could not; and he was enraged that he could not.
The more as her quivering lips, her wet eyes, her quick mounting colour, told of her gratitude. In another moment she might, almost certainly she would, have said a word fit to unlock his lips. And he would have spoken; and she would have pledged herself. But fate, in the person of old Darby, intervened. Timely or untimely, the butler appeared in the distant doorway, cried "Hist!" and, by a backward gesture, warned them of some approaching peril.
"I fear----" she began.
"Yes, go!" Asgill replied, almost roughly. "He is coming, and he must not find us together."
She fled swiftly, but the garden gate had barely closed on her skirts before Payton issued from the courtyard. The Englishman paused an instant in the gateway, his sword under his arm and a handkerchief in his hand. Thence he looked up and down the road with an air of scornful confidence that provoked Asgill beyond measure. The sun did not seem bright enough for him, nor the air scented to his liking. Finally he approached the Irishman, who, affecting to be engaged with his own thoughts, had kept his distance.
"Is he ready?" he asked, with a sneer.
With an effort Asgill controlled himself. "He is not," he said.
"At his prayers, is he? Well, he'll need them."
"He is not, to my knowledge," Asgill replied. "But he is ill."
Payton's face lightened with a joy not pleasant to see. "A coward!" he said coolly. "I am not surprised! Ill is he? Ay, I know that illness. It's not the first time I've met it."
Asgill had no wish to precipitate a quarrel. On the contrary, he had made up his mind to gain time if he could; at any rate, to put off the
ultima ratio until evening, or until the next morning. Only in the last resort had he determined to fling off the mask. But at that word "coward," though he knew it to be well deserved, his temper, sapped by the knowledge that love was forcing him into a position which reason repudiated, gave way, and he spoke his true thoughts.
"What a d--d bully you are, Payton!" he said, in his slowest tone. "Sure, and you insult the man's sister in your drink----"
"What's that to you?"
"You insult the man's sister," Asgill persisted coolly, "and because he treats you like the tipsy creature you are, you'd kill him like a dog."
Payton turned white. "And you, too," he said, "if you say another word! What in Heaven's name is amiss with you, man, this morning? Are you mad?"
"I'll not hear the word 'coward' used of the family--I'll soon be one of!" Asgill returned, speaking on the spur of the moment, and wondering at himself the moment he had made the statement. "That's what I'm meaning! Do you see? And if you are for repeating the word, more by token, it'll be all the breakfast you'll have, for I'll cram it down your ugly throat!"
Payton stared dumbfounded, divided between rage and astonishment. But the former was not slow to get the upper hand, and "Enough said," he replied, in a voice that trembled, but not with fear. "If you are willing to make it good, you'll be coming this way."
"Willingly!" Asgill answered.
"I'll have one of my men for witness. Ay, that I will! I don't trust you, Mr. Asgill, and that's flat. Get you whom you please! In five minutes, in the garden, then?"
Asgill nodded. The Englishman looked once more at him to make sure that he was sober; then he turned on his heel and went back through the courtyard. Asgill remained alone.
He had taken the step there was no retracing. He had cast the dice, and the next few minutes would decide whether it was for life or death. He had done it deliberately; yet at the last he had been so carried away by impulse that, as he stood there, looking after the man he had insulted, looking on the placid water glittering in the early sunshine, looking along the lake-side road, by which he had come, he could hardly credit what had happened, or that in a moment he had thrown for a stake so stupendous, that in a moment he had changed all. The sunshine lost its warmth and grew pale, the hills lost their colour and their beauty, as he reflected that he might never see the one or the other again, might never return by that lake-side road by which he had come; as he remembered that all his plans for his aggrandisement, and they were many and clever, might end this day, this morning, this hour! Life! It was that, it was all, it was the future, with its pleasures, hopes, ambitions, that he had staked. And the stake was down. He could not now take it up. It might well be, for the odds were great against him, that it was to this day that all his life had led up; that life by which men would by-and-by judge him, recalling this and that, this chicane and that extortion, thanking God that he was dead, or perhaps one here and there shrugging his shoulders in good-natured regret.
From the hedge-school in which he had first grasped the clue-line of his life, to the day when his father had encouraged him to "turn Protestant," that he might the better exploit his Papist neighbours, ay, and forward to this day on which, at the bidding of a woman, he had given the lie to his instincts, his training, and his education--from the one to the other he saw his life stretched out before him! And he could have cried upon his folly. Yet for that woman----"
"Faith, Mr. Asgill," cried a voice in his ear, "it's if you're ill, the Major's asking. And, by the power, it's not very well you're looking this day!"
Asgill eyed the interrupter--it was Morty O'Beirne--with a sternness which his pallor made more striking. "I am coming," he said, "I am going to fight him."
"The devil you are!" the young man answered. "Now, are you meaning? This morning that ever is?"
"Ay, now. Where is----"
He stopped on the word, and was silent. Instead, he looked across the courtyard in the direction of the house. If he might see her again. If he might speak to her. But, no. Yet--was it certain that she knew? That she understood? And if she understood, would she know that he had gone to the meeting well-nigh without hope, aware against what skill he pitted himself, and how large, how very large were the odds against him?
"But, faith, and it's no jest fighting him, if the least bit in life of what I've heard be true!" Morty said, a cloud on his face. He looked uncertainly from Asgill to the house and back. "Is it to be doing anything you want me?"
"I want you to come with me and see it out," Asgill said. He wheeled brusquely to the garden gate, but when he was within a pace of it he paused and turned his head. "Mr. O'Beirne," he said, "I'm going in by this gate, and it's not much to be expected I'll come out any way but feet first. Will you be telling her, if you please, that I knew that same?"
"I will," Morty answered, genuinely distressed. "But I'm asking, is there no other way?"
"There is none," Asgill said. And he opened the gate.
Payton was waiting for him on the path under the yew-trees, with two of his troopers on guard in the background. He had removed his coat and vest, and stood, a not ungraceful figure, in the sunshine, bending his rapier and feeling its point with his thumb. He was doing this when his eyes surprised his opponent's entrance, and, without desisting from his employment, he smiled.
If the other's courage had begun to wane--but, with all his faults, Asgill was brave--that smile would have restored it. For it roused in him a stronger passion than fear--the passion of hatred. He saw in the man before him, the man with the cruel smile, who handled his weapon with a scornful ease, a demon--a demon who, in pure malice, without reason and without cause, would take his life, would rob him of joy and love and sunshine, and hurl him into the blackness of the gulf. And he was seized with a rage at once fierce and deliberate. This man, who would kill him, and whom he saw smiling before him, he would kill! He thirsted to set his foot upon his throat and squeeze, and squeeze the life out of him! These were the thoughts that passed through his mind as he paused an instant at the gate to throw off the encumbering coat. Then he advanced, drawing his weapon as he moved, and fixing his eyes on Payton; who, for his part, reading the other's thoughts in his face--for more than once he had seen that look--put himself on his guard without a word.
Asgill had no more than the rudimentary knowledge of the sword which was possessed in that day by all who wore it. He knew that, given time and the decent observances of the fencing-school, he would be a mere child in Payton's hands; that it would matter nothing whether the sun were on this side or that, or his sword the longer or the shorter by an inch. The moment he was within reach therefore, and his blade touched the other's he rushed in, lunging fiercely at his opponent's breast and trusting to the vigour of his attack and the circular sweep of his point to protect himself. Not seldom has a man skilled in the subtleties of the art found himself confused and overcome by this mode of attack. But Payton had met his man too often on the green to be taken by surprise. He parried the first thrust, the second he evaded by stepping adroitly aside. By the same movement he put the sun in Asgill's eyes.
Again the latter rushed in, striving to get within his opponent's guard; and again Payton stepped aside, and allowed the random thrust to pass wasted under his arm. Once more the same thing happened--Asgill rushed in, Payton parried or evaded with the ease and coolness of long-tried skill. By this time Asgill, forced to keep his blade in motion, was beginning to breathe quickly. The sweat stood on his brow, he struck more and more wildly, and with less and less strength or aim. He was aware--it could be read in the glare of his eyes--that he was being reduced to the defensive; and he knew that to be fatal. An oath broke from his panting lips and he rushed in again, even more recklessly, more at random than before, his sole object now to kill the other, to stab him at close quarters, no matter what happened to himself.
Again Payton avoided the full force of the rush, but this time after a different fashion. He retreated a step. Then, with a flicker and a girding of steel on steel, Asgill's sword flew from his hand, and at the same instant--or so nearly at the same instant that the disarming and the thrust might have seemed to an untrained eye one motion--Payton turned his wrist and his sword buried itself in Asgill's body. The unfortunate man recoiled with a gasping cry, staggered and sank sideways to the ground.
"By the powers," O'Beirne exclaimed, springing forward, "a foul stroke! By G--d, a foul stroke! He was disarmed. I----"
"Have a care what you say!" Payton answered slowly, and in a terrible tone. "You'd do better to look to your friend--for he'll need it."
"It's you that struck him after he was disarmed!" Morty cried, almost weeping with rage. "Devil a bit of a chance did you give him! You----"
"Silence, I say!" Payton answered, in a fierce tone of authority. "I know my duty; and if you know yours you'll look to him."
He turned aside with that, and thrust the point of his sword twice and thrice into the sod before he sheathed the weapon. Meanwhile Morty had cast himself down beside the fallen man, who, speechless, and with his head hanging, continued to support himself on his hand. A patch of blood, bright-coloured, was growing slowly on his vest: and there was blood on his lips.
"Oh, whirra, whirra, what'll I do?" the Irishman exclaimed, helplessly wringing his hands. "What'll I do for him? He's murdered entirely!"
Payton, aided by one of the troopers, was putting on his coat and vest. He paused to bid the other help the gentleman. Then, with a cold look at the fallen man, for whom, though they had been friends, as friends go in the world, he seemed to have no feeling except one of contempt, he walked away in the direction of the rear of the house.
By the time he reached the back door the alarm was abroad, the maids were running to and fro and screaming, and on the threshold he encountered Flavia. Pale as the stricken man, she looked on Payton with an eye of horror, and, as he stood aside to let her pass, she drew--unconscious what she did--her skirts away, that they might not touch him.
He went on, with rage in his heart. "Very good, my lady," he muttered, "very good! But I've not done with you yet. I know a way to pull your pride down. And I'll go about it!"
He might have moved less at ease, he might have spoken less confidently, had he, before he retired from the scene of the fight, cast one upward glance in the direction of the house, had he marked an opening high up in the wall of yew, and noticed through that opening a window, so placed that it alone of all the windows in the house commanded the scene of action. For then he would have discovered at that casement a face he knew, and a pair of stern eyes that had followed the course of the struggle throughout, noted each separate attack, and judged the issue--and the man.
And he might have taken warning.