“I’m not frightened, Sir; but I’d not send a child out in it, just for——” He stopped, and tried to fall back behind the door.
“Just for what?” said Luttrell, with a calm and even gentle voice— “just for what?”
“How do I know, your honour. I was saying more than I could tell.”
“Yes; but let me hear it. What was the reason that you supposed—why do you think I did it?”
Deceived and even lured on to frankness by the insinuating softness of his manner, the old man answered: “Well, it was just your honour’s pride, the ould Luttrell pride, that said, ‘We’ll never send a man where we won’t go ourselves,’ and it was out of that you’d risk your child’s life!”
“I accused you of being half a coward a minute ago,” said Luttrell, in a low deep voice, that vibrated with intense passion, “but I tell you, you’re a brave man, a very brave man, to dare to speak such words as these to me! Away with you; be off; and never cross this threshold again.” He banged the door loudly after the old man, and walked up and down the narrow room with impatient steps. Hour after hour he strode up and down with the restless activity of a wild animal in a cage, and as though by mere motion he could counteract the fever that was consuming him. He went to the outer door, but he did not dare to open it, such was the force of the storm; but he listened to the wild sounds of the hurricane—the thundering roar of the sea, as it mingled with the hissing crash, as the waves were broken on the rocks. Some old tree, that had resisted many a gale, seemed at last to have yielded, for the rustling crash of broken timber could be heard, and the rattling of the smaller branches as they were carried along by the swooping wind. “What a night I what a terrible night!” he muttered to himself. There was a faint light seen through the chinks of the kitchen door; he drew nigh and peeped in. It was poor Molly on her knees, before a little earthenware image of the Virgin, to whom she was offering a candle, while she poured out her heart in prayer. He looked at her, as, with hands firmly clasped before her, she rocked to and fro in the agony of her affliction, and noiselessly he stole away and entered his room.
He opened a map upon the table, and tried to trace out the course the boat might have taken. There were three distant headlands to clear before she could reach the open sea. One of these, the Turk’s Head, was a noted spot for disasters, and dreaded by fishermen even in moderately fresh, weather. He could not take his eyes from the spot; that little speck so full of fate to him. To have effaced it from the earth’s surface at that moment, he would have given all that remained to him in the world! “Oh, what a destiny!” he cried in his bitterness, “and what race! Every misfortune, every curse that has fallen upon us, of our own doing! Nothing worse, nothing so bad, have we ever met in life as our own stubborn pride, our own vindictive natures.” It required some actual emergency, some one deeply momentous’ crisis, to bring this proud and stubborn spirit down to self-accusation; but when the moment did come, when the dam was opened, the stream rushed forth like the long pent-up waters of a cataract.
All that he had ever done in life, all the fierce provocations he had given, all the insults he had uttered, his short-comings too, his reluctance to make amends when in the wrong, passed spectre-like before him, and in the misery of his deep humiliation he felt how all his struggle in life had been with himself.