The Wild Geese

by Stanley John Weyman

She opened her mouth to shriek, but no sound came. She had heard, she understood; and for a moment she could neither struggle nor cry. That terror which rage and an almost indomitable spirit had kept at bay seized her; the sight of the gleaming death poised above her paralysed her throat. Her mouth gaped, her eyes glared at the steel; then, with a queer sobbing sound, she fainted.

"Thank God!" the Colonel cried. And there was indeed thankfulness in his voice. He thrust the knife back into the man's hands, and, raising the girl again in his arms, "There is a house a little below," he said. "We can leave her there! Hurry, man!—hurry!"

He had not traversed that road for twenty years, but his memory had not tricked him. Less than fifty paces below they came on a cabin, close to the foot of the waterfall. The door was not fastened—for what, in such a place, was there to steal?—and Colonel John thrust it open with his foot. The interior was dark, the place was almost windowless; but he made out the form of an old crone who, nursing her knees, crouched with a pipe in her mouth beside a handful of peat. Seeing him, the woman tottered to her feet with a cry of alarm, and shaded her bleared eyes from the inrush of daylight. She gabbled shrilly, but she knew only Erse, and Colonel John attempted no explanation.

"The lady of the house," he said, in that tongue. And he laid Flavia, not ungently, but very quickly, on the floor. He turned about without another word, shut the door on the two, and hurried along the path at the full stretch of his legs. In half a minute he had overtaken his companion, and the two pressed on together on the heels of the main party.

The old beldame, left alone with the girl, viewed her with an astonishment which would have been greater if she had not reached that age at which all sensations become dulled. How the Lady of the House, who was to her both Power and Providence, came to be there, and there in that state, passed her conception. But she had the sense to loosen the girl's frock at the neck, to throw water on her face, and to beat her hands. In a very few minutes Flavia, who had never swooned before—fashionable as the exercise was at this period in feminine society—sighed once or twice, and came to herself.

"Where am I?" she muttered. Still for some moments she continued to look about her in a dazed way; at length she recognised the old woman, and the cottage. Then she remembered, with a moan, what had happened—the ambuscade, the flight, the knife.

She could not turn whiter, but she shuddered and closed her eyes. At last, with shrinking, she looked at her dress. "Am I—hurt?" she whispered.

The old woman did not understand, but she patted Flavia's hand. Meanwhile the girl saw that there was no blood on her dress, and she found courage to raise her hand to her throat. She found no wound. At that she smiled faintly. Then she began to cry—for she was a woman.

But, broken as she was by that moment of terror, Flavia's indulgence in the feminine weakness was short, for it was measured by the time she devoted to thoughts of her own fortunes. Quickly, very quickly, she overcame her weakness; she stood up, she understood, and she extended her arms in rage and grief and unavailing passion. That rage which treachery arouses in the generous breast, that passion which an outrage upon hospitality kindles in the meanest, that grief which ruined plans and friends betrayed have bred a thousand times in Irish bosoms—she felt them all, and intensely. She would that the villains had killed her! She would that they had finished her life! Why should she survive, except for vengeance? For not only were her hopes for Ireland fallen; not only were those who had trusted themselves to The McMurrough perishing even now in the hands of ruthless foes; but her brother, her dear, her only brother, whom her prayers, her influence had brought into this path, he too was snared, of his fate also there could be no doubt!

She felt all that was most keen, most poignant, of grief, of anger, of indignation. But the sharpest pang of all—had she analysed her feelings—was inflicted by the consciousness of failure, and of failure verging on the ignominious. The mature take good and evil fortune as they come; but to fail at first setting out in life, to be outwitted in the opening venture, to have to acknowledge that experience is, after all, a formidable foe—these are mishaps which sour the magnanimous and poison young blood.