Jerry’s round face beamed in the vague starlight with a momentary smile. “Ah, thin, Miss Katie!” he said, in gentle deprecation. Then, as upon a hasty afterthought: “Egor! I’ll talk with Father Jago.”
“Ye’ll do nothing of the kind!” Kate commanded.
“He’s a young man, an’ he’s not Muirisc born, an’ he’s O’Daly’s fri’nd, naturally enough, an’ he’s the chaplain of the convint. Sure, with half an eye, ye can see that O’Daly’s got the convint on his side. My taking the vail will profit thim, as well as him. Sure, that’s the point of it all.”
“Thin why not putt yer fut down,” asked Jerry, “an’ say ye’ll tek no vail at all?”
“I gave me word,” she answered, simply.
“But aisy enough—ye can say as Mickey Dugan did on the gallus, to the hangman: ‘Egor!’ said he, ‘I’ve changed my mind.’”
“We don’t be changin’ our minds!” said Kate, with proud brevity; and thereupon she ran up the convent steps, and, after a little space, filled with the sound of jangling bells and the rattle of bars and chains, disappeared.
Jerry pursued the small remnant of his homeward course in a deep, brown study. He entered his abode by the churchyard postern, bolted the door behind him and lighted a lamp, still in an absent-minded way. Such flickering rays as pierced the smoky chimney cast feeble illumination upon a sort of castellated hovel—a high, stone-walled room with arched doorways and stately, vaulted ceiling above, but with the rude furniture and squalid disorder of a laborer’s cottage below.
But another idea did occur to him while he sat on the side of his bed, vacantly staring at the floor—an idea which set his shrewd, brown eyes aglow. He rose hastily, took a lantern down from a nail on the whitewashed wall and lighted it. Then with a key from his pocket, he unlocked a door at the farther end of the room, behind the bed, and passed through the open passage, with a springing step, into the darkness of a low, stone-walled corridor.
The staircase down which we saw the guns and powder carried in secrecy, on that February night in 1867, led Jerry to the concealed doorway in the rounded wall which had been discovered. He applied the needful trick to open this door; then carefully closed it behind him, and made his way, crouching and stealthily, through the passage to the door at its end. This he opened with another key and entered abruptly.