Gallagher stood for almost a minute, motionless, looking at the stairs, with his eyes almost shut. Then he shuddered and went into the guardroom. The sentry, a red-faced, young grocer’s assistant, was tying a red silk handkerchief around Flynn’s jaws. The only part of Flynn’s face that was visible was his eyes. Gallagher watched the sentry tying the knot at the back of Flynn’s skull. Then he looked into Flynn’s eyes.
Flynn stared back coldly. Although he was suffering agonies of pain from his broken jaw, his eyes betrayed no sign of pain.
“Did you fire at him, Dart?” cried Gallagher in a whisper.
Flynn made a slight nodding movement.
“Did you hit him?”
Flynn raised his right hand and waved it from side to side, like a marker giving the signal for a washout. Gallagher sighed.
“Stick it out,” he said coldly. “We’ll get a doctor as soon as the reinforcements come. Can you swallow a drop of brandy?”
Flynn nodded.
“Here’s my flask. Use it.”
He put the flask into Flynn’s hand. He pressed the hand as he did so. Then he left the guardroom and walked over to Mary McPhillip.
She left the doorway when she saw him coming. He found her sitting on the form. He stood beside her, looking at the ground, wrapt in thought, gripping her shoulder with his right hand. She became terrified at his attitude, at his silence and the look on his face, which she could see dimly in the gloom. His face had become ashen pale. His eyes had sunk and grown glassy. The blood had left his lips. He was continually grinding his back teeth, slowly.
“Dan,” she whispered at length, “what’s the matter with you?”
He did not answer for several seconds. Then he started, gasped, and let go her shoulder. He took two paces rapidly towards the door. He halted and put his hand to his forehead. He wheeled about and looked at her curiously.
“Oh yes,” he said calmly. “I forgot. Excuse me. I was thinking of something and I didn’t hear what you said. Let me see. Yes.”
He sat down beside her. He took her right hand gently into both his own and began to fondle it, with the soft gentle movements of a cat. He began to speak gently, in a soft, sad voice, looking at the floor in front of him.
“You’ll have to stay here with me now, Mary,” he said, “until I’m leaving here. Maybe we’ll have stay here two hours, maybe more. Gypo has escaped. I can’t move until I get news of him. The prisoner has escaped,” he repeated almost inaudibly. “If he can’t be found it will be the end of me, Mary. He knows so much.”
Mary turned towards him eagerly and swallowed her breath. Her eyes grew moist and her lips quivered. The gentle tone of his voice went straight to her heart. It drew her towards him, not with the dreadful fascination with which she was drawn towards him before, but with a soft, gentle attraction, like what she had imagined love would be. Not the calm, calculating, respectable affection she experienced for the man she intended to marry, Joseph Augustine Short, but that tumultuous, devouring passion which she had expected real love to be, the love that was written of in books and poems. Ah! How she could love him like this! Soft and gentle like this! She could approach him and touch him, touch something in him that was soft and gentle and sympathetic and human. He was in danger. Good God! It was good that he was in danger, if it helped to disclose to her his real self. It had made him weak, this danger, ridding him of the horrid, impenetrable strength, that kept him cruel and cold. If she could have him to herself like this, she would sacrifice even her religion for his love. Aye! She would even forsake God for him like this.
So she thought, looking at him with tears in her eyes.
She smoothed his shoulder gently with her hand and whispered to him:
“Dan,” she said, “you are in danger. Can I help you, Dan? Dan, you know I’d give my life for you.”
Gallagher turned towards her slowly.
“You would, Mary,” he said softly.
She nodded. He took her suddenly in his arms.
“You love me, Mary. Say you love me, Mary.”
“I love you, Dan,” she breathed on his lips.
They kissed passionately, with strange abandonment. Then they sat for a minute, with their cheeks together, hardly conscious of anything but of a strange exaltation that was undefinable. A hot feeling of joyous exaltation pervaded their bodies. But it was not the exaltation of love. It was an abandoned sadness born of grief. The grief of two human souls clinging together for solace. It was beautiful and pure like love, that exaltation, born of fear, and of the eternal melancholy of the entramelled Irish soul, struggling in bondage.
For Mary perhaps, it was almost pure mating love. For she loved that gentle voice; the last remnant of the gentle nature, that had been devoured in the struggle of life and replaced by a cold, callous, ambitious nature. She loved, but she only loved a phantom, a shy ghost come for an hour of the night, to fly from the dawn.
But for Gallagher, his caresses were a mask. He had hidden behind his gentle nature for the moment, as behind a mask, to rest and plot. Men like him always lean on women for support in moments of extreme danger.
Even as he sat with her arms about him, with her breathing words of love on his lips, he was thinking, not of her, but of the great danger that confronted him. Would Gypo inform
