"And get thee home, and stay there."
Old Gorry touched his cap and went up the steps.
Then, with a bankrupt smile of sorry triumph, the Bishop turned to his son. "You see," he said, "you are free. Let me look—what is the hour?" He fumbled for his watch. "Ah, I had forgotten. I paid my watch away to poor Patrick Looney. No matter. At nine by the clock Mylechreest will come for you, and you will go to your boat and set sail for Scotland, or England, or Ireland, or—or—"
Dan could bear up no longer. His heart was choking. "Father, father, my father, what are you saying?" he cried.
"I am saying that you are free to leave this place."
"I will not go—I can not go."
The Bishop fetched a long breath and paused for a moment. He put one trembling hand to his forehead, as if to steady his reeling and heated brain.
"You can not stay," he said. "Hark! do you hear the wind how it moans? Or is it the sea that beats on the rock outside? And over our heads are the dead of ten generations."
But Dan was suffocating with shame; the desolation around, the death that was lying silent above, and the mother of sorrows that was wailing beneath had no terrors left for him.
"Father, my father," he cried again, "think what you ask me to do. Only think of it. You ask me to allow you to buy the silence of the meanest hinds alive. And at what a price? At the price of the influence, the esteem, the love, and the reverence that you have won by the labor of twenty years. And to what end? To the end that I—I—"