“How came you to be without the walls?” I asked. “And at such a time?”
“We were trying to escape,” said the man, “for we heard that the city would soon be taken by the Spaniards, of whom there are thousands, and that everyone of us would be tortured and slain by them.”
“Is the Earl of Desmond in Limerick?” I next inquired—noting, however, how the number of Fitzmaurice’s men had been exaggerated.
“No,” replied the man. “He sent Grace O’Malley bound in chains into the city to Sir Nicholas Malby, but he came not himself. ’Tis said that he will neither join the Spaniards, nor yet assist us, but holds himself aloof from both until he sees on whose side fortune will declare itself.”
And this reed of rottenness, this catspaw of the wind, was the man whom my mistress, led on by the memories of the past greatness of the house of Desmond, and by the hope that under him the Irish might unite, had called our natural leader!
It had been the noble dream of a noble soul, that vision of hers; but, like many another noble dream, it was woven around a man incapable of filling the part he was called upon to play, and so was nothing but a dream.
The folly and wickedness of Desmond seemed to me to be almost inconceivable. Baulked by the firmness of my mistress, he had wreaked his wrath upon her by handing her over to the one man in all Ireland who might be supposed to regard her capture with the utmost joy, and who would take a fiendish delight in torturing her.
Having gratified his hatred of her—for such his love no doubt had become—the Earl sought to stand in with both sides in the approaching struggle by coming out openly on behalf of neither. It needed not that one should be a prophet to forecast that Desmond would fall and be crushed between the two.
While such thoughts passed rapidly through my mind, the chief thing which I had just been told—that Grace O’Malley was immured in the gaol of Limerick—threw everything else into the shade. In the hope that the men might have heard what had occurred to her after her arrival in Limerick, I asked them: