Then Patsy went off to his room, but he did not go to bed. He sat on the side of it for a long time debating matters in his mind.
He had saved Lady Molyneux’s jewels, he had not betrayed his trust, he had helped in the capture of the worst character in the county. He had done his duty, in fact, but he was not thinking of that.
He had proposed, it will be remembered, that Mr Fanshawe should load a gun with bullets and blow Paddy Murphy’s head off, and he had made the proposition in all seriousness.
But Paddy free and Paddy in prison were different people. All the sympathy in his queer nature was aroused for the man in the potato room, for prison, to the Celtic imagination, is a far more terrible thing than death.
Patsy got off his bed and, candle in hand, left his room; he came down the passage to the cupboard where the under-gardener kept his tool-chest.
He took a file from it, came back up the passage to the potato room door, slipped the file under the door, and knocked.
A loud snore was the only answer. He knocked again without eliciting a reply.
“He’s aslape,” muttered Patsy; “but maybe he’ll see it when he wakes.”
Upstairs, Mr Boxall, who had taken advantage of the open window to enter the house during Mr Murphy’s incarceration in the potato room, was making plans to leave Ireland to the Irish as soon as might be.
The incident of Mr Mooney, the outcries of Mr Murphy, the whole affair, in short, was incomprehensible to his mind, and only to be summed up in one formula: “D——d savages.”