The man growled out some sort of threat or defiance and disappeared. But it showed me that, as matters then were, there was no doing anything in a corner, and the sooner I was north the better for every one.
So when next morning my captain and I, on the top of the coach, rumbled out of the gate at which only yesterday my little mistress had waved her hand, I was glad, despite many forebodings, to find myself once more on the wing.
Chapter Twenty Four.
What I found under the hearthstone at Kilgorman.
Our journey northward was uneventful. Captain Swift and I parted company at Derry. My orders were to join the Diana at Dublin at the end of the month, which allowed me only a little over a fortnight for my business in Donegal.
You may fancy with what mingled feelings I found myself one evening standing once more on the quay at Rathmullan, looking down the lough as it lay bathed in the shifting colours of the spring sunset, trying to detect in the distance the familiar little clump of trees behind which nestled Knockowen House. Was this journey one of peace or of war? Did hope lurk for me behind yonder trees; or had I come all this way to discover that the old comrade was forsaken for the new, and that the humble star of the sailor boy had been snuffed out by the gay sun of the gentleman soldier?
Then as my eye travelled further north and caught the bluff headlands towards the lough mouth, other doubts seized me. My mother’s message had burned holes in my pocket ever since I set foot again on Irish soil. And that sacred duty done, what fate awaited me among the secret rebels from whose clutches, when last I saw the Swilly, I was fleeing for my life, but who now, if I was to believe what I had heard, counted Tim, my own brother, in their ranks?
Late as it was, I was too impatient to postpone my fate by a night’s rest at the inn, and hired a boat for a sail down the lough.