"Ah, you have!" he answered, rocking himself to and fro in his excitement. "If it were any one else, I'm as ready to fight as another! And why not? But he's killed four men, and he'll kill me! Oh, the differ, if I'd not come up at that minute! If I'd not come up at that minute!"
The picture of what he would have escaped had he mounted the stairs a minute later, of what he had brought on himself by mounting a moment earlier, was too much for him. Not a thought did he give to what might have happened to her had he come on the scene later; but, with all his cowardly soul laid bare, he rocked himself to and fro in a paroxysm of self-pity.
Yet he did not suffer more sorely, he did not wince more tenderly under the lash of his own terrors, than Flavia suffered; than she winced, seeing him thus, seeing at last her idol as he was—the braggadocio stripped from him, and the poor, cringing creature displayed. If her pride of race—and the fabled Wicklow kings, of whom she came, were often in her mind—if that pride needed correction, she had it here. If she had thought too much of her descent—and the more in proportion as fortune had straitened the line, and only in this corner of a downtrodden land was its greatness even a memory—she was chastened for it now! She suffered for it now! She could have wept tears of shame. And yet, so plain was the collapse of the man before her, and so futile words, that she did not think of reproach; even had she found heart to chide him, knowing that her words might send him to his death.
All her thought was, could she hide the blot? Could she mask the shame? Could she, at any rate, so veil it that this insolent Englishman, this bully of the conquering race, might not perceive it? That were worth so much that her own life, on this summer morning, seemed a small price to pay for it.
But, alas! she could not purchase it with her life. Only in fairy tales can the woman pass for the man, and Doris receive in her tender bosom the thrust intended for the sterner breast. Then how? How could they shun at least open disgrace, open dishonour? For it needed but a glance at her brother's pallid face and wandering eye to assure her that, brought to the test, he would flinch; that, brought to the field, he would prove unequal even to the task of cloaking his fears.
She sickened at the thought, and her eyes grew hard. Was this the man in whom she had believed? And when, presently, he turned on his side and hid his face in the pillow and groaned, she had small pity to spare for him. "Are you not well?" she asked.
"Can't you be seeing?" he answered fractiously; but for very shame he could not face her eyes. "Cannot you be seeing I am not fit to get up, let alone be meeting that devil? See how my hand shakes!"
"What is to be done, then?"
He cursed Payton thrice in a frenzy of rage. He beat the pillow with his fist.
"That does no good," she said.