What a pity that he uttered those last few words! Curran beheld again the well-known Lord Clare. Terence became hot with resentment.
'If you are preparing a St. Bartholomew,' he said, 'why should I be specially favoured? Murderer!'
'Murderer?' echoed Curran, with a scorn which incensed the chancellor. 'Worse than murderer! Common butcher of your fellows! You have netted the leaders--you will goad the leaderless sheep to leap after them. You will drive them to rise against you. Then you'll massacre them for rising. You'll turn your artillery against the helpless peasants. You'll mow them down like grass. You know their peculiarities--so far you are Irish. With a cudgel or a shillalagh there's none can beat 'em. But they're bad at firearms. Firearms! The use of gunpowder's been forbidden them for ever so many years!'
'On my honour, it's provoking to save people despite themselves,' affirmed the exasperated chancellor. 'If the boy's hanged it'll be your fault, Curran.'
'I wish for no mercy,' said moody Terence, 'from such hands as yours, my lord. I remember Orr. So will you on your death-bed. Here comes Cassidy again. Come, Mr. Curran, we'll stroll to his chambers for a glass of claret.'
The trio departed together arm-in-arm, and Lord Clare looked after their retreating figures with extreme vexation as, mounting his horse, he rode slowly to Ely Place.
The three allies retired to Cassidy's chambers, to laugh at their ease over Lord Clare's discomfiture.
'Bedad! he's losing his nerve,' Cassidy asserted, as he poured a ruby bumper down his throat. 'Did ye see how wild he aimed--like a gossoon that had never blazed? Maybe he's of the same kidney as the spalpeen in the play who betune the sheets is frighted by the Banshees.'
'Richard the Third at Bosworth?' suggested Mr. Curran. 'If he gets his deserts the chancellor's death-bed will be a fearsome spectacle.'
'It must be an awful thing to have innocent blood upon your conscience,' Terence mused. 'Yet how many are there among us now whose arms are steeped in it to the shoulder! Is it not strange that confessions of murder are nearly always of some single case? Wholesale murderers don't seem to be so troubled. The heart must be callous, I suppose, before it becomes capable of wholesale murder. Hence Shakespeare was wrong as to his ghosts on Bosworth Field. Richard slept undisturbed the sleep of the infantine and just.'