Moira thrust out appealing hands toward him.
"Oh, sir, why won't ye just be after calling out to this ship when she comes and bid them take what they will and go? Sure, that would be better than——"
"Tut, tut," he rebuked her. "A part of this treasure is to supplement the eight hundred thousand pounds intended for your father's friends—and they, my lass, are King James' friends. You are a good Jacobite, I trust, and would not see our Cause deprived of a single doubloon that might buy muskets in Lyons or swordblades in Breda?"
"Ah, 'tis little enough I feel for King James or any of them that will have sent the padre to his doom!" she cried. "And what is a Jacobite or a Hanoverian, or what worth King George or King James, that you must be murdering and slaying and he that was a good man and kind—when he wasn't in liquor—should lie in heathen ground?"
She leaped up, quivering with passion lashed aflame.
"Jacobite! The toe of my boot to the word and them that use it! Little enough hath it meant to me but poverty and exile and the death of her that bore me and now—and now—the padre—and now——"
She fled from the cabin in tears, and her stateroom door slammed after her.
"Poor lass! Poor lass!" sighed my great-uncle. "It hath been a trying day for her. We must be lenient."
"You should be down on your knees, beseeching her forgiveness, you who wantonly dragged her into this danger!" I snarled at him.
"'Wantonly,' Robert?" he objected mildly. "Certes, you should know better by now. My reasons were of the best, my motives of the highest."