The Cock and Anchor Part 35

O'Connor pursued his way towards the city, following the broken horse-track, which then traversed the low grounds which lie upon the left bank of the Liffey. The Phoenix Park, or, as it was then called, the Royal Park, was at the time of which we write a much wilder place than it now is. There were no trim plantations nor stately clumps of tufted trees, no signs of care or culture. Broad patches of s.h.a.ggy thorn spread with little interruption over the grounds, and regular roads were then unknown. The darkness became momentarily deeper and more deep as O'Connor pursued his solitary way; and the difficulty of proceeding grew every instant greater, for the heavy rains had interrupted his path with deep sloughs and pools, which became at length so frequent, and so difficult of pa.s.sage, that he was fain to turn from the ordinary track, and seek an easier path along the high grounds which overhang the river. The close screen of the wild gnarled thorns which covered the upper level on which he now moved, still further deepened the darkness; and he became at length so entirely involved in the pitchy gloom, that he dismounted, and taking his horse by the head, led him forward through the tangled brake, and under the knotted branches of the old h.o.a.ry thorns, stumbling among the briers and the crooked roots, and every moment encountering the sudden obstruction, either of some stooping branch, or the trunk of one of the old trees; so that altogether his progress was as tedious and unpleasant as it well could be. His annoyance became the greater as he proceeded; for he was so often compelled to turn aside, and change his course, to avoid these interruptions, that in the utter darkness he began to grow entirely uncertain whether or not he was moving in the right direction. The more he paused, and the oftener he reflected, the more entirely puzzled and bewildered did he become. Glad indeed would he have been that he had followed the track upon which he had at first entered, and run the hazard of all the sloughs and pools which crossed it; but he was now embarked in another route; and even had he desired it, so perplexed was he, that he could not have effected his retreat.

Fully alive to the ridiculousness, as well as the annoyance of his situation, he slowly and painfully stumbled forward, conscious that if only he could move for half an hour or thereabout consistently in the same direction, he must disengage himself in some quarter or another from the entanglement in which he was involved. In vain he looked round him; nothing but entire darkness encountered him. In vain he listened for any sound which might intimate the neighbourhood of any living thing. Nothing but the hushed soughing of the evening breeze through the old boughs was audible; and he was forced to continue his route in the same troublesome uncertainty.

At length he saw, or thought he saw, a red light gleaming through the trees. It disappeared--it came again. He stopped, uncertain whether it was one of those fitful marsh-fires which but mock the perplexity of benighted travellers; but no--this light shone clearly, and with a steady beam, through the branches; and towards it he directed his steps, losing it now, and again recovering it, till at length, after a longer probation than he had at first expected, he gained a clear s.p.a.ce of ground, intersected only by a few broken hedges and ditches, but free from the close wood which had so entirely darkened his advance. In this position he was enabled to discern that the light which had guided him streamed from the window of an old shattered house, partially surrounded by a dilapidated wall, having a few ruinous outhouses attached to it. In this building he beheld the old mansion-house of Finiskea, which then occupied the ground on which at present stands the powder-magazine, and which, by a slight alteration in sound, though without any a.n.a.logy in meaning, has given its name to the Phoenix Park.

The light streamed through the diamond panes of a narrow cas.e.m.e.nt; and still leading his horse, O'Connor made his way over the broken fences towards the old house. As he approached, he perceived several figures moving to and fro in the chamber from which the light issued, and detected, or thought he did so, among them the remarkable form of the priest who had lately been his companion upon the road. As he advanced, someone inside drew a curtain across the window, though, as O'Connor conjectured, wholly unaware of his approach, and thus precluded any further reconnoitering on his part.

"At all events," thought he, "they can spare me some one to put me upon my way. They can hardly complain if I intrude upon such an errand."

With this reflection, he led his horse round the corner of the building to the door, which was sheltered by a small porch roofed with tiles. By the faint light, which in the open s.p.a.ce made objects partially discernible, he perceived two men, as it appeared to him, fast asleep--half sitting and half lying on the low step of the door. He had just come near enough to accost them, when, somewhat to his surprise, he was seized from behind in a powerful grip, and his arms pinioned to his sides. A single antagonist he would easily have shaken off; but a reinforcement was at hand.

"Up, boys--be stirring--open the door," cried the hoa.r.s.e voice of the person who held O'Connor.

The two figures started to their feet; their strength, combined with the efforts of his first a.s.sailant, effectually mastered O'Connor, and one of them shoved the door open.

"Pretty watch you keep," said he, as the party hurried their prisoner, wholly without the power of resistance, into the house.

Three or four powerful, large-limbed fellows, well armed, were seated in the hall, and arose on his entrance. O'Connor saw that resistance against such odds were idle, and resolved patiently to submit to the issue, whatever it might be.

"Gentlemen that's caught peeping is sometimes made to see more than they have a mind to," observed one of O'Connor's conductors.

Another removed his sword, and having satisfied himself that he had not any other weapon upon his person, observed,--

"You may let his elbows loose; but jist keep him tight by the collar."

"Let the gentlemen know there's a bird limed," observed the first speaker; and one of the others pa.s.sed from the narrow hall to execute the mission.

After some little delay, O'Connor, who awaited the result with more of curiosity and impatience than of alarm, was conducted by two of the armed men who had secured him through a large pa.s.sage terminating in a chamber, which they also traversed, and by a second door at its far extremity found entrance into a rude but s.p.a.cious apartment, floored with tiles, and with a low ceiling of dark plank, supported by ponderous beams. A large wood fire burned in the hearth, beside which some half dozen men were congregated; several others were seated by a ma.s.sive table, on which were writing materials, with which two or three of them were busily employed; a number of open letters were also strewn upon it, and here and there a brace of horse-pistols or a carbine showed that the party felt neither very secure, nor very much disposed to surrender without a struggle, should their worst antic.i.p.ations be realized, in any attempt to surprise them.

Most of those who were present bore, in their disordered dress and mud-soiled boots, the evidence of recent travel. They were lighted chiefly by the broad, uncertain gleam of the blazing wood fire, in which the misty flame of two or three wretched candles which burned upon the table shone pale and dim as the last stars of night in the red dawn of an autumnal sun. In this strong and ruddy light the groups of figures, variously attired, some seated by the table, and others standing with their ample cloaks still folded around them, acquired by the contrast of broad light and shade a character of picturesqueness which had in it something wild and imposing. This singular tableau occupied the further end of the room, which was one of considerable length, and as the prisoner was led forward to the bar of the tribunal, those who composed it eyed him sternly and fixedly.

"Bind his hands fast," said a lean and dark-featured man, with a singularly forbidding aspect and a deep, stern voice, who sat at the head of the table with a pile of papers beside him. Spite of O'Connor's struggles, the order was speedily executed, and with such good-will that the blood almost started from his nails.

"Now, sir," continued the same speaker, "who are you, and what may your errand be?"

"Before I answer your questions you must satisfy me that you have authority to ask them," replied O'Connor. "Who, I pray, are you, who dare to seize the person, and to bind the limbs of a free man? I shall know this ere one of your questions shall have a reply."

"I have seen you, young sir, before--scarce an hour since," observed one of those who stood by the hearth. "Look at me, and say do you remember my features?"

"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. G.o.d 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 G.o.d'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 ill.u.s.trious sire, but I need some more satisfactory a.s.surance of his delegated authority than the bare a.s.sertion 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 n.o.ble-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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "He made his way to the aperture."

_To face page 223._]

Thus saying, he leaned himself against the part.i.tion, to await, pa.s.sively, 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, pa.s.sing through a c.h.i.n.k, fell upon the opposite wall, and, at the same time, he clearly heard the m.u.f.fled 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 a.s.sembly, 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 no small risk; each comes. .h.i.ther, _cinctus gladio_, in the cause of the king. That cause with our own lives we are bound to maintain; and why not, if need be, at the cost of the lives of others? No good can come of sparing this fellow--at the best, no advantage to the cause: and, on the other hand, should he prove a traitor, a spy, or even an idle babbler, the heaviest damage may befall us. Tush, tush, gentlemen, it is ill straining at gnats in such times. We are here a court-martial, or no court at all. If I find that such dangerous vacillation as this carries it in your councils, I shall, for one, henceforward hang my sword over the mantel-piece, and obey the new laws. What! one life against such a risk--one execution, to save the cause and secure us all. To us, who have served in the king's wars, and hanged rebels by the round dozen--even on suspicion of being so--such indecision seems incredible. There ought not to be two words about the matter. Put him to death."

Having thus acquitted himself, this somewhat unattractive personage applied himself, with much industry and absorption, to the task of chopping, shredding, rolling up, and otherwise preparing a piece of tobacco for the bowl of his pipe.