“And who is it for?” said Mrs. Branagan, who, affecting to bestow a critical examination on the document, was inspecting the superscription wrong side up.
“'Tis for Master Mark; I heard it all outside the door; they don't want him to go with the boys, now that the French is landed, and we're going to have the country to ourselves. 'Tis a dhroll day when an O'Donoghue would'nt have a fight for his father's acres.”
“Bad cess to the weak-hearted, wherever they are,” exclaimed Mrs. Branagan; “don't give him the letter, Kerry avich; lie quiet in the glen till evening, and say you couldn't find him, by any manner of means. Do that, now, and it will be a good sarvice to your country this day.”
“I was just thinking that same myself,” said Kerry, whose resolution wanted little prompting; “after I cross the river, I'll turn into the Priests' Glen, and never stir out till evening.”
With these honest intentions regarding his mission, Kerry set out, and if any apology could be made for his breach of faith, the storm might plead for him; it had now reached its greatest violence; the wind blowing iu short and frequent gusts, snapped the large branches like mere twigs, and covered the road with fragments of timber; the mountain rivulets, too, were swollen, and dashed madly down the rocky cliffs with a deafening clamour, while the rain, swooping past in torrents, concealed the sky, and covered the earth with darkness. Muttering in no favourable spirit over the waywardness of that sex, to whose peculiar interposition he ascribed his present excursion, Kerry plodded along, turning, as he went, a despairing look at the barren and bleak prospect around him. To seek for shelter in the glen, he knew was out of the question, and so he at once determined to gain the priest's cottage, where a comfortable turf fire and a rasher of bacon were certain to welcome him.
Dreadful as the weather was, Kerry wondered that he met no one on the road. He expected to have seen groups of people, and all the signs of that excitement the arrival of the French might be supposed to call forth; but, on the contrary, everything was desolate as usual, not a human being appeared, nor could he hear a signal nor a sound, that betokened a gathering.
“I wouldn't wonder now if it was a lie of Sam Wylie's, and the French wasn't here at all,” said he to himself; “'tis often I heerd that Hemsworth could have the rebellion brake out whenever he liked it, and sorra bit but that may be it now, just to pretend the French was here, to get the boys out, and let the army at them.”
This reflection of Kerry's was scarcely conceived, when it was strengthened by a boy who was coming from Glengariff with a turf-car, and who told him that the ships that came in with the morning's tide had all weighed anchor, and sailed out of the Bay before twelve o'clock, and that nobody knew anything about them, what they were, and whence from. “We thought they were the French,” said the boy, “till we seen them sailing away; but then we knew it wasn't them, and some said it was the King's ships coming in to guard Bantry.”
“And they are not there now?” said Kerry.
“Not one of them; they're out to say, and out of sight, this hour back.”