'You are fine devil's spawn, no doubt,' he said, while his nose wrinkled, 'but we don't want you just yet. You're but a baby blustering like a man. Look at his smooth chin--or is it a girl? Newgate's a brave residence for summer, if your purse is well lined; if not, best hang yourself before going thither. No, no! I've no warrant to arrest your ladyship--but your time will come, I doubt not.'
'Let him be!' cried his brother Thomas. 'Whither do you take us?'
'First to Kilmainham with you,' Sirr replied sharply. 'Then with the rest to Newgate; then to your offices to seize your precious newspaper, demolish your press, and scatter your type. Have you any objection?'
'That is illegal,' Thomas affirmed, 'till the paper is condemned for sedition.'
The town-major gave vent to a grumbling cachinnation like the rattling of a skeleton in a cupboard, but no smile lit up his sinister countenance. Then he echoed:
'Illegal, ha, ha! That can be set right. Forward--march!'
The cortége moved across the quadrangle, and the massive gates of Alma Mater closed behind it. Robert Emmett sat dazed, while the yellow in the sky above the roofs changed to pink and then to blue; for they were gone--away from the sanctuary into the wicked world without; no hue and cry could save them now. The junior dean, his nerves calmed by whisky-punch, lay cosily between the blankets, dreaming of the bishopric he had won that night. An early gownsman, flinging wide his shutters before settling to his morning's work, smiled down on the wild rake who must have come in too drunk to find his way to bed. Boys will be boys, though their mammas wish that they would act as sages; and they must season their heads while they are young.
But the studious undergraduate was wrong in his surmise. Excitable by temperament, delicate in body, and overwrought in mind, Robert Emmett had swooned away.