CHAPTER XIII.
A SURPRISE.
As I stepped from the boat on to the face of the rock, which forms a natural quay on one side of the small harbour on the sea-front of the castle, both Grace and Eva O’Malley, who had seen me coming across the waters, met me and asked how I fared.
I was not so spent with the travail of my wearisome journey as not to be conscious of a novel sort of shyness on the part of my dear, who seemed rather to hang back behind her foster-sister, and not to be so open and outspoken with me as formerly. With some bitterness of soul I attributed this change of manner to her thoughts being engrossed with de Vilela—so little was I able to read the maid’s mind.
But it was no fitting time for either the softness or the hardness of love, and my first care was to relate all that had chanced since I had seen them last.
Great was their astonishment at the way in which Sabina Lynch came again into the tale of our fortunes, and I could see, from a certain fierceness with which Grace O’Malley alluded to her, that a heavy reckoning was being laid up against her by my mistress. Eva, however, appeared to be more struck by the hopelessness of Sabina Lynch’s affection for Richard Burke, and found it in her heart to pity her.
When I gave Richard Burke’s message to Grace O’Malley, she rejoiced exceedingly thereat, and from that moment—at least, so it seems to me looking backward to those days—she began to esteem him more highly than heretofore, and to cherish some feeling of tenderness for him, her enmity against Sabina Lynch, though she would not acknowledge that there could be any rivalry between them, helping, perhaps, thereto not a little.
And it appeared to me as a thing curious in itself, and not readily explained, except by saying that my mistress was not free from weakness, that she should have shown a compassion, as she had done when she had spoken to me some time before of de Vilela, for the hapless love of a man, and had nothing of the kind for Sabina Lynch.
Whatever were her thoughts on these matters, what she said afforded no indication of them, for, so soon as she had heard that the MacWilliam purposed to bring over from the country of the Lower Burkes, as they were called, to distinguish them from the Burkes of Clanrickarde, his gallowglasses to her aid against the English, she at once proceeded to count up how many swords and spears were at his command. Moreover, she regarded, she said, his rising against the Governor as a splendid and sure sign of what would shortly take place over the whole of Ireland.
Continuing the tale of my adventures, I related the conversation I had overheard in the case of the mysterious Whispering Rocks, and my mistress ordered that when the men, whose council of treachery I had become acquainted with in so strange a way, made their appearance, they should forthwith be admitted into the castle, as if we had had no knowledge of their intended perfidy, and that they should not be dealt with as traitors until she deemed that time was ripe for it.