At length, with a sigh drawn from his very soul, he roused himself, and, taking a candle, he made the round of the chamber. The door by which he had entered was the only outlet, and it was of stout oak, clamped with iron, and locked. For windows, a pair of loopholes, slits so narrow that on the brightest day the room must be twilit, pierced the wall towards the lake. If the room had not been used of old as a prison, it made an admirable one; for the ancient walls were two feet thick, and the groined roof was out of reach, and of stone, hard as the weathering of centuries had left it. But not so hard, not so cruel as her heart! Flavia! The word almost came from his lips in a cry of pain.
Yet what was her purpose? He had been lured hither; but why? He tried to shake off the depression which weighed on him, and to think. His eyes fell on the table; he reflected that the answer would doubtless be found among the papers that lay on it. He sat down in the chair which was set before it, and he took up the first sheet that came to hand, a note of a dozen lines in her handwriting—alas! in her handwriting.
"Sir," so it ran,—
"You have betrayed us; and, were that all, I'd still be finding it in my heart to forgive you. But you have betrayed also our Country, our King, and our Faith; and for this it's not with me it lies to pardon. Over and above, you have thought to hold us in a web that would make you safe at once in your life and your person; but you are meshed in your turn, and will fare as you can, without water, food, or fire, until you have signed and sealed the grant which lies beside this paper. We're not unmerciful; and one will visit you once in twenty-four hours until he has it under your hand, when he will witness it. That done, you will go where you please; and Heaven forgive you. I, who write this, am, though unjustly, the owner of that you grant, and you do no wrong.
"Flavia McMurrough."
He read the letter with a mixture of emotions. Beside it lay a deed, engrossed on parchment, which purported to grant all that he held under the will of the late Sir Michael McMurrough to and for the sole use of Constantine Hussey, Esquire, of Duppa. But annexed to the deed was a separate scroll, illegal but not unusual in Ireland at that day, stating that the true meaning was that the lands should be held by Constantine Hussey for the use of The McMurrough, who, as a Roman Catholic, was not capable of taking in his own name.
Fully, only too fully, enlightened by Flavia's letter, Colonel John barely glanced at the parchments; for, largely as these, with their waxen discs, prepared to receive the impress of the signet on his finger, bulked on the table, the gist of all lay in the letter. He had fallen into a trap—a trap as cold, cruel, heartless as the bosom of her who had decoyed him hither. Without food or water! And already the chill of the earthen floor was eating into his bones, already the damp of a hundred years was creeping over him.
For the moment he lacked the spirit to rise and contend by movement against the one or the other. He sat gazing at the paper with dull eyes. For, after all, whose interests had he upheld? Whose cause had he supported against James McMurrough and his friends? For whose sake had he declared himself master at Morristown, with no intention, no thought, as Heaven was his witness, of deriving one jot or one tittle of advantage for himself? Flavia's! Always Flavia's! And she had penned this! she had planned this! She had consigned him to this, playing to its crafty end the farce that had blinded him!
His mind, as he sat brooding, travelled back to the beginning of it all; to the day on which Sir Michael's letter, with a copy of his will, had reached his hands, at Stralsund on the Baltic, in his quarters beside the East Gate, in one of those Hanse houses with the tall narrow fronts which look like nothing so much as the gable-ends of churches. The cast of his thoughts at the reading rose up before him; the vivid recollections of his home, his boyhood, his father, which the old man's writing had evoked, and the firmness with which, touched by the dead man's confidence, a confidence based wholly on report, he had resolved to protect the girl's interests. Sir Michael had spoken so plainly of James as to leave the reader under no delusion about him. Nevertheless, Colonel John had conceived some pity for him; in a vague way he had hoped that he might soften things for him when the time came. But that the old man's confidence should be justified, the young girl's inheritance secured to her—this had been the purpose in his mind from first to last.
And this was his reward!