'What's that for?' asked Nick.
'It's loaded,' replied Kelly. 'I went up to my room, after the little girl had taken me, and loaded it and slipped it into my pocket,' and he began to laugh, perhaps something awkwardly. 'For, you see, since she prizes me, why I am grown altogether valuable.' He put back the pistol in his pocket. 'But don't misunderstand me, Nick. The new fears are quite overbalanced by a new confidence. Sure, it's not the future I am afraid of.'
'I understand,' said Wogan gravely. 'It's what's to come.'
'Yes, that's it,' said Kelly.
Being afraid, and being a man of honour, Kelly did nothing, said nothing on the head of his old love affair, and trembled with apprehension of he knew not very well what. A path of flowers stretched before him, but a shadow walked on it, a tall, handsome shadow, yet unfriendly. It is Mr. Wogan's firm belief, based on experience, that a woman always finds everything out. The only questions are, when, and how will she take it? Sometimes it is a letter in the pocket of an old coat which the dear charitable creature is giving to a poor devil of a chairman. Sometimes it is a glance at a rout, which she shoots flying. Now it is a trinket, or a dead flower in a book, or a line marked in a poem, but there is always a trail of the past, and woman never misses it.
George's wooing seemed as flowery as the meadows about Avignon, white with fragrant narcissus, or as the gardens purple with Judas trees in spring. Rose was all parfait amour, and, in her eyes, Mr. Kelly was a hero, a clerical Montrose, or a Dundee of singular piety. Wogan has known women more zealous for the Cause, such as her Grace of Buckingham, or Madame de Mézières, who had ever a private plot of her own running through the legs of our schemes, like a little dog at a rout, and tripping us up. To Miss Townley George was the Cause, and the Cause was George, so that, in truth, she was less of a Jacobite than a Georgite.
There never had been such a George as hers for dragons. Why did he fight Mr. Scrope? She was certain it was all for the Cause! Indeed, that casus belli, as the lawyers say, proved a puzzle. Why, in fact, did the Parson come to be lying on the flags, in receipt of a sword-thrust of the first quality? George was the last man to brag of his services, but he was merely obliged to put the sword-thrust down to his credit with the Cause. His enemy had been a Whig, a dangerous spy, which was true, but not exactly all the truth, about as much of it as a man finds good for a woman.
Rose clasped her hands, raised her eyes to Heaven, and wondered that it did not better protect the Right. What other deeds of arms had her warrior done? She hung on George imploring him to speak of deadly 'scapes, and of everything that it terrified her to hear. Mr. Kelly, in fact, had never drawn sword in anger before; he was, by profession, a man of peace and of the pen. If ever he indulged a personal ambition, it would have been for a snug Irish deanery, and he communicated to Miss Townley a part of his favourite scheme, for leisure, a rose-hung parsonage, and Tully, his Roman friend.
But the girl put this down to his inveterate modesty, remarked by all Europe in his countrymen.
'Nay, I know you have done more,' she said one day alone with him in a bower of the garden. 'You have done something very brave and very great, beyond others. You helped to free the Queen from the Emperor's prison at Innspruck!'