“Don't be afeared, yer honer, she 'll be betther in a minute or two. She has more courage than her father there,” and she pointed to the outside room where Lord Kilgoff sat. “Indeed, the first word she spoke was about yerself.”
Cashel made a gesture to be silent, and sat down beside the settle, his gaze fixed on the features, which, in their calm loveliness, had never seemed more beautiful.
The stillness that now reigned in the little cabin, only broken by the low whisperings without, the calm tranquillity so suddenly succeeding to the terrible convulsion, the crowd of sensations pressing on the brain, and, above all, the immense fatigue he had gone through, brought on such a sense of stupor that Cashel fell heavily on the floor, and with his head leaning against the settle, fell into a sound sleep.
Before evening had closed in most of the party had recovered from their fatigues, and sat grouped in various attitudes round the blazing fire of the cabin. In a deep, old-fashioned straw chair, reclined, rather than sat, Lady Kilgoff; a slightly feverish flush lent a brilliancy to her otherwise pale features, deepening the expression of her full soft eyes, and giving a more animated character to the placid beauty of her face. Her hair, in all the loose freedom of its uncared for state, fell in great voluptuous masses along her neck and shoulders, while part of a finely-turned arm peeped out beneath the folds of the wide scarlet cloak which the fisherman's wife had lent her in lieu of her own costly “Cashmere.”
Next to her sat Roland; and although dressed in the rough jacket of a sailor, his throat encircled by a rude cravat of colored worsted, he seemed in the very costume to have regained some of his long-lost joyousness, and, notwithstanding the sad event of the night, to be in a very ecstasy of high spirits. Sickleton, too, seemed like one who regarded the whole adventure as a circumstance too common-place for much thought, and busied himself writing letters to various persons at Cashel's dictation, sorely puzzled from time to time to follow out the thread of an intention, which Roland's devotion to the lady at his side more than once interrupted.
The most disconsolate and woe-begone of all was the poor peer, who, propped up by cushions, sat with unmeaning gaze steadily riveted on the fire. There was something so horribly absurd, too, in the costume in which he was clad, that converted all pity into a sense of ridicule. A great wide pea-jacket encircled his shrunken, wasted figure to the knees, where the thin attenuated legs appeared, clad in blue worsted stockings, whose wide folds fell in a hundred wrinkles around them; a woollen cap of red and orange stripes covered his head, giving a most grotesque expression to the small and fine-cut features of his face. If Lady Kilgoff and Cashel had not been too much interested on other topics, they could not have failed to discover, in the occasional stealthy glances that Sickleton cast on the old lord, that the costume had been a thing of his own devising, and that the rakish air of the nightcap, set sideways on the head, was owing to the sailor's inveterate fondness for a joke, no matter how ill-timed the moment or ill-suited the subject of it.
Behind them, and in a wider circle, sat the fisherman and his family, the occasional flash of the fire lighting up the gloom where they sat, and showing, as in a Rembrandt, the strong and vigorous lines of features where health and hardship were united—the whole forming in the light and shadow a perfect subject for a painter.
From the first moment of the mishap, Lord Kilgoff had sunk into a state of almost child-like imbecility, neither remembering where he was, nor taking interest in anything, an occasional fractious or impatient remark at some parsing inconvenience being all the evidence he gave of thought. It devolved, therefore, upon Cashel to make every arrangement necessary,—an assumption on his part which his natural respect and delicacy made no small difficulty. As for Lady Kilgoff, she appeared implicitly to yield to his judgment on every point; and when Roland suggested that, instead of returning to Dublin and all its inevitable rumors, they should at once proceed to Tubbermore, she assented at once, and most willingly.