Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/120

 greater calmness than before. "All my life I have not shed any man's blood, because it did not seem to me to be wholly a good thing to do, and I hesitated. But now, in my old age, my last day, I have only one mind in me. You and your people have come where no one asked you, and you have put massacre and desolation of famine and destruction upon us, when we had not deserved it. And I have told you that our truce is ended, and you will not be believing it, and now I will prove it to you."

Upon the word he smote the captain in the face with one hand, and with the other plunged his skene into his neck. The two men clutched each other, and as they toppled, writhing, to the ground, rival cries of battle split the air. The English, with full-mouthed oaths and shouts of wrath, hurled themselves forward. The Irish, huddling backward to guard their unarmed folk, raised a defiant answering yell, and fought in wild despair. They were hewn down where they stood, and after them their priests and women and children. Nothing that had come out of Dunbeekin was left with a breath in it.

The English captain, chalk-faced, and with his throat swathed in stained bandages, leant upon his sword while the straps of his cuirass were unbuckled, and the cumbrous breastplate lifted from him. He looked down with a rueful, musing half-smile at the trampled form of an old man which had been dragged out from a confused pile of bodies, and lay stretched at his feet. The head was bruised and the white hair was torn and clotted, but the withered upturned face, looking very small and waxen now, wore an aspect of pride and sweetness which moved him. He gently pushed the hair aside from the marble temples with his boot, and sighed as he looked again.

"Shall we send the head to Cork?" asked another officer, resting on one knee beside the body. "After all, he was a lord