Page:The fortunes of Perkin Warbeck.djvu/123

Rh him to his Irish friends than his fearless confidence, and artless, yet not undignified reliance on their counsels. He had gained a warm friend in the former mayor, O'Water, a man reverenced throughout Munster. In his youth he had served in the army, and his spirit was hardly yet tamed to the pacific habits of a burgher. He was sixty years of age; but he bore his years lightly, and remembered but as the occurrence of yesterday the time when the duke of York, grandfather of young Richard, was lord of Ireland. He had attached himself particularly to his person, and followed him to England, returning to his own country after his patron's death. He saw in the descendant of his chief, his rightful lord, to refuse obedience to whom was a sin against the laws of God and man. He fervently swore never to desert him, and despatched emissaries on all sides to spread the tidings of his arrival, and excite the partizans of the White Rose to his active assistance.

When the letters were written, council held, and a course of conduct determined, on, still the caravel of De Faro did not appear, and Richard grew weary of his state of indolence. A week passed; and during the second, at the conclusion of which, the answers from the noble chieftains were expected, the duke of York announced to O'Water his intention of visiting Buttevant, the seat of Lord Barry, where, in the Abbey of Ballybeg, he hoped to find the abbot of Kilmainham; a man who, in exile and poverty, exercised great influence over the Irish Yorkists. He had been insolent and cruel towards his enemies when in power, but he was endowed with popular qualities for his followers; while among his friends, he was valued for his boldness, sagacity, and undaunted courage. His career had been turbulent; he had supported himself against his sovereign by acts of lawless violence, till, obliged at last to yield, he found himself, in his old age, a poor brother in a distant monastery, obliged, for safety's sake, to veil his lofty pretensions in the obscurest guise. Lord Barry had offered him an asylum in the Abbey of Ballybeg; venerating, with the blind admiration of a soldier, the learning and craft of the priest, conjoined, as it here was, to dauntless courage. O'Water, on the contrary, disliked the subtle prior, and endeavoured to dissuade the prince from the journey; but he spurned the city laziness, and in spite of his friends' entreaties, and their fears for his safety among the followers of Desmond, Barry, and Macarthy, departed on his intended visit, attended only by Hubert Burgh, the foster-brother of Lord Barry.

The way from Cork to Buttevant was not far, but more desolate than Granada during the Moorish war. Summer and the sun adorned that smiling land, casting a verdurous mantle