A sick feeling came over her heart, and she would have fainted but for a sudden inspiration. Again she seized the telescope,--an unusually strong one, by the way,--and raising it to her eyes with unsteady hand, eagerly swept the sea off in the direction of Flamborough Head, rising faintly down to the southward, a long distance away. For a long time her nervous, trembling hands could not get that part of the horizon in focus. She finally knelt down and rested the tube upon the parapet, breathing a prayer as she did so, and looked again.
Ah! At last she had it, and there swept into the field of vision three gleams of white on the skyline, proclaiming, even to her unpractised eye, the sails of ships! What had that indomitable man said to her last night in the hall?
"Delay the execution for at least six hours, and I will save him!" He was not one to promise lightly. She would try again. The telescope fell with a crash at her feet.
She would make one more appeal to the admiral; it was late, but there might yet be time. On the instant she turned, leaving the startled maid, and ran like a fleet-footed fawn along the terrace, down the stone steps through the water battery, through the bailey, into the inner court, down the long passage, and into the great hall of the night before, where the admiral was usually to be found at this hour. She dashed impetuously into the room, crying,--
"The admiral, quick! where is he?"
"Ships has been reported down at Bridlin'ton Bay,--furrin ships, yer Leddyship," replied the old sergeant, who happened to be there alone, "an' his Ludship took horse about half-past twelve o'clock to go down there."
Failure! Her last hope gone! She sank down into the chair. Reaction had come; she was fainting, helpless, dying. It was over! The sergeant started toward her, his face full of pity. She was sitting in the admiral's chair, by the great table. Her glance fell listlessly upon it. At the moment another idea flashed into her mind. Desperate, foolish, nevertheless, she would try it--try anything; this, at least, was action. She started to her feet again on the instant, instinct with life.
"Leave me at once, and see that no one interrupts me; I wish to be alone," she said imperiously to the astonished sergeant, who bowed respectfully and withdrew. A half an hour later she came hurriedly out of the room, white-faced, drawn, nerved up to desperate endeavor.
How he got through the night, O'Neill never knew. The court-martial in the morning had taken little time; its sentence, a foregone conclusion, promptly approved by the admiral, had been death by hanging at half after six o'clock that night. He had refused to give any further parole, in the faint hope that something might enable him to escape, and consequently had been heavily ironed and placed in confinement in the space between two of the great guns on the lower gun-deck--the Serapis was a double-banked frigate--on the starboard side. The forethought of Coventry, who had attended him with the solicitude and kindness of a brother, and had pleaded for him unavailingly before the court, had caused a canvas screen to be provided, which enclosed two of the guns, and allowed him to pass his hours undisturbed by the curious gaze of the English seamen. An armed marine stood always as sentry before the screen.
Captain Pearson, a gallant officer, had been kindness itself in all his arrangements, but his orders, which were peremptory, left him no discretion whatever. O'Neill passed his time sitting by the open port, leaning on a gun, gazing out over the water at the gray old castle where he had found his love and met his fate. Many tragedies had been enacted within its walls during long centuries of history--none sadder than his own.