"People in the court-yard!" cried the old man, now fairly aroused to that same fear which had been haunting Nellie for the last half-hour. "What people, Nellie? Tell me, child, if you can distinguish whether they seem to be natives or strangers to the place. Our fate, alas! may be dependent on that fact."
The girl walked forward, and shading her eyes with her hand from the blinding sunshine, looked again, and yet again, in the direction of the tower.
"Yes," she said at last; "I was not mistaken. There is a party in the court-yard, and some of them are even standing in the gate-way, as if they had but this instant stept forth from the mansion. Surely, grandfather, we cannot have misunderstood or mistaken our instructions? There is no other building to be seen—even in the distance—and this one answers in all respects to the description. The man, too, from whom we inquired our way this morning, assured us that it was called 'The Rath'—the very name set down in our certificate. We cannot have been mistaken, and yet—and yet—if there be persons already in possession, their claim must needs be superior to our own."
She spoke hesitatingly, and in broken sentences, as if she were following out a train of thought in her own mind, rather than addressing her companion. He listened anxiously, and a cloud gathered on his brow as he gradually took in her meaning.
"It may be only some of the natives," he said at last, in a low voice. "The original owners, perhaps, of the tower, who have waited our arrival before giving up possession."
"Owners!" said Nellie quickly. "They told us at Loughrea that the owner had perished in the war, and that therefore we should find it empty."
"They may have been mistaken, Nellie. They know little enough, I think, those high and mighty commissioners at Loughrea, of the land of which they are so liberally disposing; and still less, I doubt me, of its original possessors."
"And if they are mistaken, we shall take the place of the rightful owners, and so deal out to others the very measure which our enemies have dealt to us. Grandfather, if we are guilty of this thing, we shall have a twofold sin upon our souls—their iniquity and our own."
"What would you have, child?" he answered pettishly; for, truth to say, he had yet quite enough of the Englishman about him, not to be over-particular as to the rights of the native Irish. "What would you have? Did you not know already that, in the acceptation of these lands, we were taking that which it was neither in the Cromwellians' right to give or in ours to receive? And what if an old tumble-down tower be thrown into the bargain? Trust me, Nellie, the business is so black already that, like the face of his Satanic majesty, who is the author of it, a little more or less of smutch will hardly make it blacker or uglier than it is."
"I never thought of this before," said Nellie sadly; "I thought only—fool that I was, so selfishly intent on my own misfortunes—I thought only of tracts of land left barren for want of inhabitants to till them, and of houses emptied by the fate of war. I never dreamed of men and women and little children turned out of their pleasant homes to make room for us—us who have as little right to their possessions as the English soldiers have to ours!"