Uncle Ulick put his big form between Colonel John and his assailant. "Sure and be easy!" he said. "Sir Donny, you're forgetting yourself! And you, Tim Burke! Be easy, I say. It's only for himself the Colonel's speaking!"
"Thank God for that!" Flavia cried in a voice which rang high.
They were round him now a ring of men with dark, angry faces, and hardly restrained hands. Their voices cried tumultuously on him, in defiance of Ulick's intervention. But the Bishop intervened.
"One moment," he said, still speaking smoothly and with a smile. "Perhaps it is for those he thinks he speaks!" And the Bishop pointed to the crowd which filled the forecourt, and of which one member or another was perpetually pressing his face against the panes to learn what his sacredness, God bless him! would be wishing. "Perhaps it is for those he thinks he speaks!" he repeated in irony—for of the feeling of the crowd there could be no doubt.
"You say well," Colonel John replied, rising to his feet and speaking with gloomy firmness. "It is on their behalf I appeal to you. For it is they who foresee the least, and they who will suffer the most. It is they who will follow like sheep, and they who like sheep will go to the butcher! Ay, it is they," he continued with deeper feeling, and he turned to Flavia, "who are yours, and they will pay for you. Therefore," raising his hand for silence, "before you name the prize, sum up the cost! Your country, your faith, your race—these are great things, but they are far off and can do without you. But these—these are that fragment of your country, that tenet of your faith, that handful of your race which God has laid in the palm of your hand, to cherish or to crush, and——"
"The devil!" Machin ejaculated with sudden violence. Perhaps he read in the girl's face some shadow of hesitation, of thought, of perplexity. "Have done with your preaching, sir, I say! Have done, man! Try us not too far! If we fail——"
"You must fail!" Colonel John retorted—with that narrowing of the nostrils that in the pinch of fight men long dead had seen for a moment in distant lands, and seen no more. "You will fail! And failing, sir, his reverence will stand no worse than now, for his life is forfeit already! While you——"
"What of me? Well, what of me?" the stout man cried truculently. His brows descended over his eyes, and his lips twitched.
"For you, Admiral Cammock——"
The other stepped forward a pace. "You know me?"