Limit is it? Let me tell you, sir, I would rather be the poorest exile than live thus. I would rather beg my bread barefoot among strangers, never to see the sod again, never to hear the friendly Irish tongue, never to smell, the peat reek, than live on this tenure, at the mercy of a hand I loathe, on the sufferance of a man I despise, of an informer, a traitor, ay, an apostate----"

"Flavia! Flavia!" Colonel John's remonstrance was full of pain.

"Ah, don't call me that!" she rejoined pa.s.sionately. "Don't make me hate my own name! Better a hundred times an open foe----"

"Have I ever been anything but an open foe?" he returned. "On this point at any rate?"

She swept the remonstrance by. "Better," she cried vehemently, "far better a fate we know, a lot we understand; far better freedom and poverty, than to live thus--yesterday a laughing-stock, to-day slaves; yesterday false to our vows, to-day false to our friends! Oh, there must be an end! There----"

She choked on the word, and her distress moved Asgill to do a strange thing. He had listened to her with an admiration that for the time purified the man, lifted him above selfishness, put the desire to triumph far from him. Now he stepped forward. "I would rather never cross this threshold again," he cried; "never, ay, believe me, I would rather never see you again, than give you this pain! I go, dear lady, I go! And do not let one thought of me trouble or distress you! Let this gentleman have his way. I do not understand. I do not ask to understand, how he holds you, or constrains you. But I shall be silent."

He seemed to the onlookers as much raised above himself as Colonel John seemed depressed below himself. There could be no doubt with whom the victory lay: with whom the magnanimity. Asgill stood erect, almost beatified, a Saint George, a knight of chivalry. Colonel Sullivan showed smaller to the eye, stood bowed and grey-faced, a man beaten and visibly beaten.

But as Asgill turned on his heel Flavia found her voice. "Do not go!"

she cried impulsively. "There must be an end! There must be an end of this!"

But Asgill insisted. He saw that to go, to submit himself to the sway against which she revolted was to impress himself upon her mind, was to commend himself to her a hundred times more seriously than if he stayed. And he persisted. "No," he said; "permit me to go." He stepped forward and, with a grace borrowed for the occasion, and with lips that trembled at his daring, he raised and kissed her hand. "Permit me to go, dear lady. I would rather banish myself a hundred times than bring ill into this house or differences into this family."

"Flavia!" Colonel Sullivan said, finding his voice at last, "hear first, I am begging you, what I have to say! Hear it, since against my will the matter has been brought to your knowledge."

"That last I can believe!" she cried spitefully. "But for hearing, I choose the part this gentleman has chosen--to go from your presence.

What?" looking at the Colonel with white cheeks and flaming eyes--Asgill had turned to go from the room--"has it come to this? That we must seek your leave to live, to breathe, to have a guest, to eat and sleep, and perhaps to die? Then I say--then I say, if this be so, we have no choice but to go. This is no place for us!"

"Flavia!"

"Ah, do not call me that!" she retorted. "My hope, joy, honour, are in this house, and you have disgraced it! My brother is a McMurrough, and what have you made of him? He cowers before your eye! He has no will but yours! He is as good as dumb--before his master! You flog us like children, but you forget that we are grown, and that it is more than the body that smarts. It is shame we feel--shame so bitter that if a look could lay you dead at my feet, though it cost us all, though it left us beggared, I would look it joyfully--were I alone! But you, cowardly interloper, a schemer living on our impotence, walk on and trample upon us----"

"Enough," Colonel Sullivan cried, intolerable pain in his voice. "You win! You have a heart harder than the millstone, more set than ice! I call you to witness I have struggled hard, I have struggled hard, girl----"

"For the mastery," she cried venomously. "And for your master, the devil!"

"No," he replied, more quietly. "I think for G.o.d. If I was wrong, may He forgive me!"

"I never will!" she protested.

"I shall not ask for your forgiveness," he retorted. He looked at her silently, and then, in an altered tone, "The more," he said, "as my mind is changed again. Ay, thank G.o.d, changed again. A minute ago I was weak; now I am strong, and I will do my duty as I have set myself to do it. When I came here I came to be a peacemaker, I came to save the great from his folly and the poor from his ignorance, to shield the house of my fathers from ruin and my kin from the gaol and the gibbet.

And I stand here still, and I shall persist--I shall persist."

"You will?" she exclaimed.

"I shall! I shall remain and persist."

Pa.s.sion choked her. She could not find words. After all she had said he would persist. He was not to be moved--he would persist. He would still trample upon them, still be master. The house was no longer theirs, nor was anything theirs. They were to have no life, no will, no freedom--while he lived. Ah, while he lived. She made an odd gesture with her hands, and turned and went up the stairs, leaving him master of the field. The worse for him! The worse, the worse, the worse for him!

CHAPTER XVIII

A COUNTERPLOT

Luke Asgill rode slowly from the gates, not without a backward glance that raked the house. The McMurrough walked by his stirrup, talking rapidly--he, too, with furtive backward glances. In five minutes he had explained the situation and the Colonel's vantage ground. At the end of those minutes, and when they were at some distance from the house, "I see," Asgill said thoughtfully. "Easy to put him under the sod! But you're thinking him worse dead than alive."

"Sorra a doubt of it!"

"Yet the bogs are deep," Asgill returned, his tone smacking faintly of raillery. "You might deal with him first, and his heir when the time came. Why not?"

"G.o.d knows!" James answered. "And I've no taste to make the trial." He did not name the oath he had taken to attempt nothing against Colonel John, nor to be a party to any attempt. He had slurred over that episode. He had dwelt in preference on the fact of the will and the dilemma in which it placed him.

Asgill looked for some moments between his horse's ears, flicking his foot the while with his switch. When he spoke he proved in three or four sentences that if his will was the stronger, his cunning was also the more subtle. "A will is revocable," he said. "Eh?"

"It is."

"And the man that's made one may make another?"

"Who's doubting it?"

"But you're doubting," Asgill rejoined--and he laughed as he spoke--"that it would not be in your favour, my lad."

"Devil a bit do I doubt it!" James said.

"No, but in a minute you will," Asgill answered. And stooping from his saddle--after he had a.s.sured himself that his groom was out of earshot--he talked for some minutes in a low tone. When he raised his head again he clapped The McMurrough on the shoulder. "There!" he said, "now won't that be doing the trick for you?"

"It's clever," James answered, with a cruel gleam in his eyes. "It is d--d clever! The old devil himself couldn't be beating it by the length of his hoof! But----"

"What's amiss with it?"

"A will's revocable," James said, with a cunning look. "And what he can do once he can do twice."

"Sorrow a doubt of that, too, if you're innocent enough to let him make one! But you're not, my lad. No; the will first, and then----" Luke Asgill did not finish the sentence, but he grinned. "Anything else amiss with it?" he asked.

"No. But the devil a bit do I see why you bring Flavvy into it?"

"Don't you?"

"I do not."

Asgill drew rein, and by a gesture bade his groom ride on. "No?" he said. "Well, I'll be telling you. He's an obstinate dog; faith, and I'll be saying it, as obstinate a dog as ever walked on two legs! And left to himself, he'd, maybe, take more time and trouble to come to where we want him than we can spare. But, I'm thinking, James McMurrough, that he's sweet on your sister!"

The McMurrough stared. The notion had never crossed his mind. "It's jesting you are?" he said.

"It's the last thing I'd jest about," Asgill answered sombrely. "It is so; whether she knows it or not, I know it! And so d'you see, my lad, if she's in this, 'twill do more--take my word for it that know--to break him down and draw the heart out of him, so that he'll care little one way or the other, than anything you can do yourself!"

James McMurrough's face, turned upwards to the rider, reflected his admiration. "If you're in the right," he said, "I'll say it for you, Asgill, you're the match of the old one for cleverness. But do you think she'll come to it, the jewel?"

"She will."

James shook his head. "I'm not thinking it," he said.