Nellie assented, and quickening her pace almost to a run, she was in her grandfather's arms ere Roger, who came on more leisurely, had time to join them.
Lord Netterville gazed lovingly into Nellie's face, and smiled as he saw the bright color which exercise had called into her pale cheeks. Then he turned courteously toward his host. Perhaps he had some vague idea in his old head that the fate of his grandchild was to be henceforth, in some way or other, connected with that of Roger; perhaps he was not himself aware of the significance of his action; but this at all events is certain, that, instead of relinquishing Nellie's hand, he kept it tightly in his own, and when the young chieftain approached to greet him, laid it silently in that of Roger.
There was enough in the action itself, and still more in the way in which it was done, to send the blood scarlet to Nellie's brow, and she struggled to release her hand. For one moment, however, Roger held it, gently but firmly, he even made a movement as if he were about to raise it to his lips; instead of doing so, however, he dropped it quietly, and said in a low voice:
"Not now, not yet; but when you are once more at your mother's side, will you permit me to remind you of this moment, and to ask for the treasure which I now relinquish, at the hands of her who is your only lawful guardian?"
Chapter X.
Early the next morning, Nellie found herself gliding over the waters of Clew Bay in one of the native corraghs of the country, under the protection of her host. He was captain and crew all in one, and she was his only passenger; for it had been decided on the previous evening that Lord Netterville was not in a fit state to endure the fatigue of such a voyage, and with old Nora to look after his creature comforts, and Maida to guard him in his lonely fortress, Roger assured his granddaughter that she need have no scruple in leaving him during the two or three hours required for their enterprise. And Nellie had readily obeyed; for, if the truth must be told, she had begun to rely implicitly upon his judgment, and to submit to it as unquestioningly as if she had been a child. The little shyness produced by Lord Netterville's thoughtless action of the day before had entirely worn off, partly because she herself had striven womanfully against the feeling, but chiefly because Roger, thoroughly comprehending how needful it was to her comfort that, during her residence in his lonely kingdom, she should be entirely at her ease in his society, had adopted, as if by instinct, precisely the affectionate, brotherly sort of manner which was of all others the best calculated to produce this result. Nellie therefore gave herself up without a thought to the pleasant novelty of a brotherly sort of petting and protection which seemed to call for nothing more than quiet acceptance on her part, and she listened to Roger with the keen and unsated interest of a child as he told her the names, one after another, of many of the clustered islands and rugged rocklets, glittering like jewels in the deep bosom of the bay, almost always contriving to add some little legend or stray scrap of history, which gave each for the moment an especial, and (if the expression may be allowed toward inanimate objects) an almost personal interest in her eyes. At last he turned her attention toward the mainland, pointing out the graceful windings of Clew's varied shore, its wave-worn caverns and rocky arches, its cliffs with their mantles of many-colored lichens which made them look at that distance as if nature had stained them into an imitation of most curiously-colored marble; and beyond these again, its broad tracts of uncultivated bog-land, purple with heath in autumn, but now yellow with gorse or dark with waving fern, its hills rising one above another in lonely, savage grandeur, with Croagh Patrick, the monarch of them all, standing up on the south side of the bay, and looking down in haughty, cold indifference upon its waters as they flowed beneath him. Nellie followed his eye and finger eagerly as he pointed out each individual feature in the scene before her; but observing that he lingered for a moment on Croagh Patrick, she turned toward him for explanation.
"It is Croagh Patrick," he said; then perceiving that she was not much the wiser for the information, he added in some surprise, "Do you not know the legend, that it was from the cone of yonder hill St. Patrick pronounced the curse which banished all venomous hurtful things from Ireland? Had the saint lived in these days," Roger added, in that undertone which Nellie had by this time discovered to be natural to him in moments of deep feeling, "it is not, I think, against toads and snakes that he would have directed his miracle-working powers, but against the men who, coming to a land which is not their own, make war in God's name against God's creatures, hunting them down with horn and hound, and snaring and slaying them with as little compunction as they would have snared or slain a wolf."
"Would he then have expelled me also?" asked Nellie, with a wicked smile. "You know that I, too, (and more's the pity!) have blood of the hated Saxon in my veins."
"Certainly not," said Roger promptly, "with your blue-black eyes and blue-black hair, he would without a doubt (saint and prophet though he was) have been deluded into believing you a Celt."
"And so I am almost," said Nellie, with childish eagerness; "only consider, Colonel O'More, we have been in the country almost three hundred years, and in all that time, until my dear father's marriage with my mother, (who is unfortunately an Englishwoman,) it has been the boast and tradition of our race that its sons and daughters have never wedded save with the sons and daughters of their adopted land."