CHAPTER V.
[AWAY TO DONEGAL.]
The countess was much scandalised at the scene from which she had escaped, and favoured her niece with decided opinions on the subject, as six horses dragged the carriage through the night along the road to Drogheda.
'This will give you a notion, my dear,' she said, 'of the results of letting low people have too much of their own way. I confess that Lord Clare's conduct surprises me. If your friends the United Irishmen were to obtain the upper hand for a few days, they would disgrace themselves and disgust the world. You can't expect wisdom from a Helot-class.'
'It was not my friends who misbehaved themselves to-night,' Doreen retorted, 'but yours; the vulgar squireens and half-mounted gentry, who belong to the dominant party.'
'They certainly should have learnt manners from their betters,' acquiesced my lady, lowering her standard. She had seen but little of the world of late, had been content to view events through coloured glasses, and the hasty glimpse of garish daylight which had just flashed out saddened and shocked her. She began unconsciously to wonder whether Lord Clare had always spoken the truth. It would be hard, she felt, to lose faith in her old friend. Then the tangle of long-rooted prejudice, parted for an instant, closed round her again. 'Well, well! the squireens might possibly be more brutish than was desirable; but they were at least Protestants, and as such, superior to the Helots over whom they tyrannized!'
This reflection was a comfort to my lady; for she was not a bad woman, but one whose sympathies had been narrowed by the hardness of the world, and who had grown as uncharitable as many excellent people are who, professing to be more enlightened than their neighbours, are certain that they only are right, and all those who differ from them wrong.
Doreen lay back on the cushions, too sore in mind and body to carry on the argument. All that she could distinctly realise was that hope had flown away; that Theobald had been near at hand and was gone; that perhaps he had been captured and executed. What must he have suffered to have been within touch of motherland, only to be swept back again to sea! Hope, forsooth! What is hope? too often but long-drawn disappointment in disguise!
The party jerked and jolted over the interminable road. The hostelries at Drogheda and Dundalk were full. It was well that my lord had ridden forward, for so many families were beginning to steal out of Dublin that, as an ostler put it, there was a 'furious penury of beds.'
At Derry they were compelled to leave the great family coach, for there was only a rough track along each wild bank of Lough Swilly, at whose mouth--its feet laved by the Atlantic--stood the island home of the pirate earls of Ennishowen. Their yacht lay ready in Rathmelton harbour; but Shane said he preferred riding across the bog to Malin Head, whence a boat would transport him in no time to Glas-aitch-é; and Doreen offered to ride too, even in his company--so anxious was she in her numbed condition to divert her thoughts by exercise. My lady--her projects being what they were--was little likely to object to a prolonged tête-à-tête which might assist in the realisation of cherished wishes; but her own riding-days were over, she said. She would take the yacht, and would not be sorry of a few hours' solitude. Poor mother! She was sacrificing more to her elder-born than he would probably ever know, in revisiting the ill-omened place--where that which darkened her life had been accomplished--where everything would prattle of that past time which it had been a never-ending struggle to forget. She desired to look again on the weather-worn parapets and slender watch-tower of Glas-aitch-é Castle alone, lest her face should betray her feelings, and hint at the secret which had blanched her hair before its time.