At that a brother officer touched his arm, and, disregarding his gesture of impatience, drew him aside. The intervener seemed to be reminding him of something; and the Colonel, not inattentive, and indeed suspicious, caught the name "Asgill" twice repeated. But Payton was too angry to care for minor consequences, or to regard anything but how he might most quickly escape from the scene of defeat and the eyes of those who had witnessed his downfall. He shook off his adviser with a rough hand.
"What do I care?" he answered with an oath. "He must shoe his own cattle!" Then, with a poor show of hiding his spite under a cloak of insouciance, he addressed the Colonel. "The mare is yours," he said. "You've won her. Much good may she do you!"
And he turned on his heel and went out of the armoury.
CHAPTER VII
BARGAINING
The melancholy which underlies the Celtic temperament finds something congenial in the shadows that at close of day fall about an old ruin. On fine summer evenings, and sometimes when the south-wester was hurling sheets of rain from hill to hill, and the birch-trees were bending low before its blast, Flavia would seek the round tower that stood on the ledge beside the waterfall. It was as much as half a mile from the house, and the track which scaled the broken ground to its foot was rough. But from the narrow terrace before the wall the eye not only commanded the valley in all its length, but embraced above one shoulder a distant view of Brandon Mountain, and above the other a peep of the Atlantic. Thither, ever since she could remember, she had carried her dreams and her troubles; there, with the lake stretched below her, and the house a mere Noah's ark to the eye, she had cooled her hot brow or dried her tears, dwelt on past glories, or bashfully thought upon the mysterious possibilities of that love, of that joint life, of that rosy-hued future, to which the most innocent of maidens must sometimes turn their minds.
It was perhaps because she often sought the tower at sunset, and he had noted the fact, that Luke Asgill's steps bore him thither on an evening three days after the Colonel's departure for Tralee. Asgill had remained at Morristown, though the girl had not hidden her distaste for his presence. But to all her remonstrances The McMurrough had replied, with his usual churlishness, that the man was there on business—did she want to recover her mare, or did she not? And she had found nothing more to say. But the most slavish observance on the guest's part, and some improvement in her brother's conduct—which she might have rightly attributed to Asgill's presence—had not melted her. She, who had scarcely masked her reluctance to receive a Protestant kinsman, was not going to smile on a Protestant of Asgill's past and reputation; on a man whose father had stood hat in hand before her grandfather, and whose wealth had been wrung from the sweat of his fellow peasants.
Be that as it might, Asgill did not find her at the tower. But he was patient; he thought that she might still come, and he waited, sitting low, with his back against the ruined wall, that she might not see him until it was too late for her to retreat. By-and-by he heard footsteps mounting the path; his face reddened, and he made as if he would rise. Remembering himself, however, he sat down again, with such a look in his eyes as comes into a dog's when it expects to be beaten. But the face that rose above the brow was not Flavia's, but her brother's. And Asgill swore.
The McMurrough understood, grinned, and threw himself on the ground beside him. "You'll be wishing me in the devil's bowl, I'm thinking," he said. "Yet, faith, I'm not so sure—if you're not a fool. For it's certain I am, you'll never touch so much as the sole of her foot without me."