"I will not, your honour," the old servant answered earnestly.
"Tell him, then, that Colonel Sullivan made his will as he passed through Paris, and 'tis now in Dublin. You mind me, Darby?"
The old man began to shake—he had an Irish man's superstition. "I do, your honour. But the saints be between us and harm," he continued, with the same gesture of distress. "Who's speaking of wills?"
"Only tell him that in his bed," Colonel John repeated, with an urgent look. "That is all."
"And by your leave, it is now we'll be going," Og interposed sharply. "We are late already for what we've to do."
"There are some things," the Colonel replied with a steady look, "which it is well to be late about."
Having fired that shot, he turned his eyes once more on the house. Then, without further remonstrance, he and Bale, with their guard, marched out through the gate, and took the road along the lake—that same road by which the Colonel had come some days before from the French sloop. The men with the firelocks walked beside them, one on either flank, while the pikemen guarded them behind, and O'Sullivan Og brought up the rear.
They had not taken twenty paces before the fog swallowed up the party; and henceforth they walked in a sea of mist, like men moving in a nightmare from which they cannot awake. The clammy vapour chilled them to the bone: while the unceasing wailing of seagulls, borne off the lough, the whistle of an unseen curlew on the hillside, the hurtle of wings as some ghostly bird swept over them—these were sounds to deepen the effect, and depress men who had reason to suspect that they were being led to a treacherous end.
The Colonel, though he masked his apprehensions under an impenetrable firmness, began to fear no less than that—and with cause. He observed that O'Sullivan Og's followers were of the lowest type of kerne, islanders in all probability, and half starved; men whose hands were never far from their skenes, and whose one orderly instinct consisted in a blind obedience to their chief. O'Sullivan Og himself he believed to be The McMurrough's agent in his more lawless business; a fierce, unscrupulous man, prospering on his lack of scruple. The Colonel could augur nothing but ill from the hands to which he had been entrusted; and worse from the manner in which these savage, half-naked creatures, shambling beside him, stole from time to time a glance at him, as if they fancied they saw the winding-sheet high on his breast.
Some, so placed, and feeling themselves helpless, isolated by the fog, and entirely at these men's mercy, might have lost their firmness. But he did not; nor did Bale, though the servant's face betrayed the keenness of his anxiety. They weighed indeed, certainly the former, the chances of escape: such chances as a headlong rush into the fog might afford to unarmed men, uncertain where they were. But the Colonel reflected that it was possible that that was the very course upon which O'Sullivan Og counted for a pretext and an excuse. And, for a second objection, the two could not, so closely were they guarded, communicate with each other in such a way as to secure joint action.