Lord Dunseveric and Maurice breakfasted together at eight o’clock on the morning of Neal’s escape. They sat in the room where Lord O’Neill lay, and had a table spread for them beside the window. It was impossible to eat a meal in any comfort elsewhere in the inn. Indeed, but for the special exertions of the master and his maid it would have been difficult to get food at all. Maurice was triumphant and excited. Since Neal had not been brought back it was reasonable to suppose that he had made good his escape out of the town, and there was every hope that he would get safe to the coast. Once there he had friends enough to feed him, and hiding-places known to few, and almost inaccessible to soldiers or yeomen.

Lord Dunseveric asked no questions about Maurice’s doings in the night. He felt perfectly confident that Neal had got off somehow. The details of the business he would hear later on. For the present he preferred to know nothing about them.

An officer entered the room and handed a letter to Lord Dunseveric. It was a request, in civil language enough, that he would meet General Clavering in the public room of the inn at nine o’clock, and that Maurice would accompany his father.

General Clavering sat at the head of the table when Lord Dunseveric and Maurice entered. Three or four of the senior officers of the regular troops sat with him. Captain Twinely, in a suit of clothes he had borrowed from the master of the inn, and one of his men, stood near the fireplace. The room had been cleared of the drunken sleepers, but a good deal of the dÉbris of their revel—empty bottles, broken glasses, and little pools of spilt wine—were still visible on the floor.

“I have to announce to you, Lord Dunseveric,” said the general, “that the prisoner who was confined in the inn cellar last night, Neal Ward, has escaped.”

Lord Dunseveric bowed, and smiled slightly. His eye lighted on Captain Twinely, and his smile broadened. The landlord’s suit fitted the captain extremely ill.

“Indeed,” he said, “Captain Twinely seems to be unfortunate with regard to this particular prisoner. This is, let me see, the third time that Neal Ward has—ah!—evaded his vigilance.”

“The sentry who guarded the door of the cellar,” said General Clavering, “was attacked, overpowered, bound, and gagged.”

“By the prisoner?”

“No, my lord, by some one who assisted the prisoner to escape, who, after dealing with the sentry as I have described, unlocked the door of the cellar with a key, the duplicate of that which Captain Twinely had in his pocket. This man and the prisoner subsequently stripped Captain Twinely of his uniform, and, as I learn from my sentries, Neal Ward passed through our lines in the disguise of a captain of yeomanry.”

“You surprise me,” said Lord Dunseveric, “a daring stratagem; a laughable scheme, too. I trust you took no cold, Captain. I confess that I should have liked to have seen you in your shirt tails this morning. You were, I presume,” he stirred a little heap of broken glass with his foot as he spoke, “vino gravatus when they relieved you of your tunic. But what has all this to do with me?”

“Merely this,” said General Clavering, “that your son is accused of having effected the prisoner’s escape.”

Lord Dunseveric looked at Maurice, looked him quietly up and down, as if he saw him then for the first time.

“I can believe,” he said, “that my son might overpower the sentry. He is, as you see, a young man of considerable personal strength, but I should be surprised to learn that he dressed the prisoner in the captain’s uniform. I may be misjudging my son, but I have hitherto regarded him as somewhat deficient in humour. You must admit, General Clavering, that only a man with a feeling for the ridiculous would have thought of——”

“It will be better for you to hear what the sentry has to say, my lord, and I beg of you to regard the matter seriously. I assure you it will not bear joking on. The rescue of a prisoner is a grave offence. Captain Twinely, kindly order your man to tell his story.”

“Since I am not a prisoner at the bar,” said Lord Dunseveric, “I shall, with your permission, sit down. As to the seriousness of the business in hand, I confess that for the moment the thought of the worthy Twinely waking this morning not only with a splitting headache but without a pair of breeches on him keeps the humorous side of the situation prominent in my mind.”

The sentry told his story. To Maurice’s great relief, he omitted all mention of the girl who had supplied the lamp which so conveniently burnt low, but he had recognised Maurice and was prepared to swear to his identity.

“No doubt,” said General Clavering, “you will wish to cross-question this man, my lord.”

Lord Dunseveric yawned.

“I think that quite unnecessary,” he said, “a much simpler way of arriving at the truth of the story will be to ask my son whether he rescued the prisoner or not. Maurice, did you bind and gag this excellent trooper?”

“Yes.”

“Did you subsequently release Neal Ward from the cellar?”

“Yes.”

“Now, Maurice, be careful about your answer to my next question. Did you take the clothes off Captain Twinely?”

“Yes.”

“And was that part of the scheme entirely your own? Did the idea originate with you or with the prisoner whom you helped to escape?”

“It was my idea.”

“I apologise to you, Maurice. I did you an injustice. You have a certain sense of humour. It is not perhaps of the most refined kind, still you have, no doubt, provided a joke which will appeal to the officers’ mess in Belfast, Dublin, and elsewhere; which will be told after dinner in most houses in the county for many a year to come. And now, General Clavering, I presume there is no more to be said. I wish you good morning.”

“Stop a minute,” said General Clavering, “you cannot seriously suppose that your son, simply because he is your son, is to be allowed to interfere with the course of justice?”

“Of justice?” asked Lord Dunseveric in a tone of mild surprise.

“With His Majesty’s officers in the execution of their duty—that is, to release prisoners whom I have condemned—I, the general in command charged with the suppression of an infamous rebellion. Your son, my lord, will have to abide the consequences of his acts.”

“Maurice,” said Lord Dunseveric, “it is evident that you are going to be hanged. General Clavering is going to hang you. It is really providential that you didn’t steal his breeches. He would probably have flogged you first and hanged you afterwards if you had.”

“Damn your infernal insolence,” broke out General Clavering furiously, “You think that because you happen to be a lord and own a few dirty acres of land that you can sit there grinning like an ape and insulting me. I’ll teach you, my lord, I’ll teach you. By God, I’ll teach you and every other cursed Irishman to speak civil to an English officer. You shall know your masters, by the Almighty, before I’ve done with you.”

Lord Dunseveric rose to his feet. He fixed his eyes on General Clavering, and spoke slowly and deliberately.

“I ride at once to Dublin,” he said. “I shall lay an account of your doings and the doings of your troops before His Majesty’s representative there. I shall then cross to England, approach my Sovereign and yours, General Clavering. I shall see that justice is done between you and the people you have outraged and harried. As to my son, I have work for him to do. I shall make myself responsible for his appearance before a court of justice when he is summoned. In the meanwhile, I neither recognise you as my master nor your will as my law. I appeal to the constitutional liberties of this kingdom of Ireland and to the right of every citizen to a fair trial before a jury of his fellow-countrymen. You shall not arrest, try, or condemn my son otherwise than as the law allows.”

General Clavering grew purple in the face. He stuttered, cursed, laid his hand on his sword, and took a step forward. Lord Dunseveric, his hands behind his back, a sneer of contempt on his face, looked straight at the furious man in front of him.

“Do you propose,” he said, “to stab me and then hang my son?”

This was precisely what General Clavering would have liked to do, but he dared not. He turned instead on Captain Twinely.

“Let me tell you, sir, that you’re a damned idiot, an incompetent officer, a besotted fool, and your men are a lot of cowardly loons. You had this infernal young rebel safe and you let him go. You not only allowed him to walk off, but you actually provided him with a suit of clothes to go in. You’re the cause of all the trouble. Get your troop to horse. Scour the country for him. Don’t leave a house that you don’t search, nor a bed that you don’t run your sword through. Don’t leave a dung-heap without raking it, or a haystack that you don’t scatter. Get that man back for me, wherever he hides himself, or, by God, I’ll have you shot for neglect of duty in time of war, and your damned yeomen buried alive in the same grave with you.”

The general was still bent on teaching the Irish to know their masters and making good his boast of reducing them to the tameness of “gelt cats.” With Captain Twinely, at least, he seemed likely to succeed.

“I can imagine, Maurice,” said Lord Dun-severic, when they were alone together again, “that Captain Twinely and his men have at last got a job to suit them. Sticking swords through old wives feather beds is safer work than sticking them through rebels. Scattering haystacks will be pleasanter than scattering pikemen. Raking dung heaps will, I suppose, be an entirely congenial occupation.”

His tone changed, He spoke rapidly and seriously.

“You will ride with me as far as Belfast. From there you must find some means of communicating with the captain of that Yankee brig of which you told me. If necessary, go yourself to Glasgow and find the man. Pay him what he asks and arrange that he lies off Dunseveric and picks up Neal. You must then go home and see to it yourself that Neal gets safe on board. It may not be easy, for the yeomen will be after him; but it has got to be done. I go to Dublin as I said. I shall have some trouble in settling this business of yours. It really was an audacious proceeding—your rescue of the prisoner. It will take me all my time to get it hushed up. Besides, I must use my influence to prevent bad becoming worse in this unfortunate country of ours. By the way, did you make any arrangement for the return of Captain Twinely’s uniform when Neal had finished with it?”

“No, I never thought of that.”

“You ought to have thought of it. Poor Captain Twinely looks very odd in the inn-keeper’s clothes, which do not fit him in the least.”