"I do," replied O'Connor, who had no difficulty in recognizing those of the priest who had parted from him so abruptly on that evening—"of course I recollect your face; we rode side by side from Leixlip to-day."
"You recollect my caution too—you cannot have forgotten that," continued the priest, menacingly. "You know how peremptorily I warned you against following me, yet you have dogged me here; on your own head be the consequences—the fool shall perish in his folly."
"I have not dogged you here, sir," replied O'Connor; "I seek my way to Dublin. The river banks are so soft that a horse had better swim than seek to keep them; I therefore took the upper ground, and after losing myself among the woods, at length saw a light, reached it, and here I am."
The priest heard the statement with a sinister smile.
"A truce to these inventions, sir," said he. "It is indeed possible that you speak the truth, but it is in the highest degree probable that you lie; it is, in a word, plain—satisfactorily plain, that you followed me hither, as I suspected you might have done; you have dogged me, sir, and you have seen all that you sought to behold; you have seen my place of destination and my company. I care not with what motive you have acted—that is between yourself and your Maker. If you are a spy, which I shrewdly suspect, Providence has defeated your treason, and punished the traitor; if mere curiosity impelled you, you will remember that ill-directed curiosity was the sin which brought death upon mankind, and cease to wonder that its fruits may be bitter to yourself. What say you, young man?"
"I have told you plainly how I happened to reach this place," replied O'Connor; "I have told you once—I will repeat the statement no more; and once again I ask, on what authority you question me, and dare thus to bind my hands and keep me here against my will?"
"Authority sufficient to satisfy our own consciences," rejoined the priest. "The responsibility rests not upon you; enough it is for you to know that we have the power to detain you, and that we exercise that power, as we most probably shall another, still less conducive to your comfort."
"You have the power to make me captive, I admit," rejoined O'Connor—"you have the power to murder me, as you threaten, but though power to keep or kill is all the justification a robber or a bravo needs, methinks such an argument should hardly satisfy a consecrated minister of Christ."
The expression with which the priest regarded the young man grew blacker and more truculent at this rebuke, and after a silence of a few seconds he replied,—
"We are doubly authorized in what we do—ay, trebly warranted, young traitor. God Almighty has given us the instinct of self-defence, which in a righteous cause it is laudable to consult and indulge; the Church, too, tells us in these times to deal strictly with the malignant persecutors of God's truth; and lastly, we have a royal warranty—the authority of the rightful king of these realms, investing us with powers to deal summarily with rebels and traitors. Let this satisfy you."
"I honour the king," rejoined O'Connor, "as truly as any man here, seeing that my father lost all in the service of his illustrious sire, but I need some more satisfactory assurance of his delegated authority than the bare assertion of a violent man, of whom I know absolutely nothing, and until you show me some instrument empowering you to act thus, I will not acknowledge your competency to subject me to an examination, and still resolutely protest against your detaining me here."
"You refuse, then, to answer our questions?" said the hard-featured little person who sat at the far end of the table.
"Until you show authority to put them, I peremptorily do refuse to answer them," replied the young man.
The little person looked expressively at the priest, who appeared to hold a high influence among the party. He answered the look by saying,—
"His blood be upon his own head."
"Nay, not so fast, holy father; let us debate upon this matter for a few minutes, ere we execute sentence," said a singularly noble-looking man who stood beside the priest. "Remove the prisoner," he added, with a voice of command, "and keep him strictly guarded."
"Well, be it so," said he, reluctantly.
The little man who sat at the head of the table made a gesture to those who guarded O'Connor, and the order thus given and sanctioned was at once carried into execution.
Chapter XLIV.
The Doom
The young man was conveyed from the chamber by his two athletic conductors, the door closed upon the deliberations of the stern tribunal who were just about to debate upon the question of his life or death, and he was led round the corner of a lobby, a few steps from the chamber where his judges sat; a stout door in the wall was pushed open and he himself thrust through it into a cold, empty apartment, in perfect darkness, and the door shut and barred behind him.
Here, in solitude and darkness, the horrors of his situation rushed upon him with tremendous and overwhelming reality. His life was in the hands of fierce and relentless men, by whom, he had little doubt, he was already judged and condemned; bound and helpless, he must await, without the power of hastening or of deferring his fate by a single minute, the cold-blooded deliberations of the conclave who sat within. Unable even to hear the progress of the debate on whose result his life was suspended, a faint and dizzy sickness came upon him, and the cold dew burst from every pore; ghastly, shapeless images of horror hurried with sightless speed across his mind, and his brain throbbed with the fearful excitement of madness. With a desperate effort he roused his energies; but what could human ingenuity, even sharpened by the presence of urgent and terrific danger, suggest or devise? His hands were firmly bound behind his back; in vain he tugged with all his strength, in the fruitless hope of disengaging the cords which crushed them together. He groaned in downright agony as, strength and hope exhausted, he gave up the desperate attempt; nothing then could be done; there remained for him no hope—no chance. In this horrible condition he walked with slow steps to and fro in the dark chamber, in vain endeavouring to compose his terrible agitation.
"Were my hands but free," thought he, "I should let the villains know that against any odds a resolute man may sell his life dearly. But it is in vain to struggle; they have bound me here but too securely."
Thus saying, he leaned himself against the partition, to await, passively, the event which he knew could not be far distant. The surface against which he leaned was not that of the wall—it yielded slightly to his pressure—it was a door. With his knee and shoulder he easily forced it open, and entered another chamber, at the far-side of which he distinctly saw a stream of light, which, passing through a chink, fell upon the opposite wall, and, at the same time, he clearly heard the muffled sound of voices in debate. He made his way to the aperture through which the light found entrance, and as he did so, the sound of the voices fell more and more distinctly upon his ear. A small square, of about two feet each way, was cut in the wall, affording an orifice through which, probably, the closet in which he stood was imperfectly lighted in the daytime. A plank shutter was closed over this, and barred upon the outside, through the imperfect joints of which the light had found its way, and O'Connor now scanned the contents of the outer chamber. It was that in which the assembly, in whose presence he had, but a few minutes before, been standing, were congregated. A low, broad-shouldered man, whose dress was that of mourning, and who wore his own hair, which descended in meagre ringlets of black upon either side, leaving the bald summit of his head exposed, and who added to the singularity of his appearance not a little by a long, thick beard, which covered his chin and upper lip—this man, who sat nearly opposite to the opening through which O'Connor looked, was speaking and addressing himself to some person who stood, as it appeared, divided by little more than the thickness of the wall from the party whose life he was debating.
"And against all this," continued the speaker, "what weighs the life of one man—one life, at best useless to the country, and useless to the king—at best, I say? What came we here for? No light matter to take in hand, sirs; to be pursued with