“Yet not so does it appear to me,” said Eva, as if she had seen into my heart! “For Desmond is Desmond—a mass of treachery, a thing, a beast! But when I saw how Dermot Fitzgerald felt about the matter, I implored him to try to set you, Ruari, at least, at liberty. And he was the more ready to listen to me because of this very Sabina Lynch, for, said he, she owed her life to you, and he wished to pay back the debt for this woman, whom he loves.”
Richard Burke kept muttering to himself, repeating, as I thought, “Sabina Lynch! Sabina Lynch!” and what else I could not guess.
“Next day,” said Eva, “a large number of the Geraldines left Askeaton, and Fitzgerald, being won over entirely to me, told me he would endeavour that night, there being but few men in the castle, to effect your escape and mine also. In the evening the gallowglasses drank deep—deeper even than they knew, for their wine and aqua vitæ had been drugged—and then, when all was still, he came to me who was ready, waiting. I asked him where you were, and he replied that he wished me to go with him to you, as you would trust me, and not, perhaps, him.”
“I see it all,” said I.
“Going up to the room where you lay,” continued Eva, “we heard a noise; that made us pause, then we went on again—and you know the rest. The noise we had heard had so far alarmed us that we thought it best to tell you what we did. Fitzgerald had seen to everything—said I not rightly that he was my friend?”
And now Burke cried again, as Eva stopped speaking, “What is to be done? What is to be done?” For myself, while I echoed his question, I was in so great a coil that I was as one dumb.
CHAPTER XXII.
“ONLY A WOMAN.”
“What is to be done?” asked Richard Burke.