A Marriage of Convenience Read Online Free

the shore. The rescuing Fenian staggered, seemed to freeze, and then fell face downward into the brown water. Before anyone moved to prevent it, he was washed downstream with the current. Shocked, and shaking with anger, Clinton strode towards the point from which the shot had come. He saw a uniformed figure enter the river lower down and strike out to reach the man who had just been hit. Clinton told a trooper to go and find out who this soldier was; then, slightly mollified by this disinterested act, he went on to try to discover why the shot had been fired. The sergeant responsible told him that the man had pulled out a knife and had tried to stab the soldiers ordered to arrest him. When this weapon was fished out of the muddy water, Clinton sighed and asked no further questions. The body of the Irishman who had been shot first had been dragged up onto the grass; Clinton had seen enough corpses to recognize the unmistakable attitude of death. The now certain fact that the other Fenian’s bravery had been futile from the beginning, added to Clinton’s desolation.
    Returning to his horse, he was overtaken by the trooper he had sent to bring back the name of the soldier who had gone to the aid of the hapless Irishman.
    ‘Corporal Harris, sir.’
    ‘Did he get the man ashore?’
    ‘Yes, sir. Done for, he was … the Irish lad. Between the eyes, sir.’
    The man had said this with pleasure and seemed surprised that Lord Ardmore did not commend the accuracy of the sergeant’s shot. Clinton stood a moment, as if thinking of something else, and then turned on his heel. Above the farm the low clouds werebreaking up and the sun began to come through, shimmering on the wet grass. Somewhere in the bracken the croak of a pheasant seemed to answer the faint cries of a wounded man.
    An hour later, when the two troops were once more winding their way along the cut-up woodland track, with four dead Fenians roped to the gun-limber, and twice that number of wounded, moaning with every sliding tilt of the farm cart carrying them, Clinton looked ahead over his horse’s ears at the silent phalanx of prisoners trudging between the. double line of their mounted escort. Behind him, his men riding in columns of threes were laughing and joking with each other. Not one had been hurt and no horses lost.
    ‘Your trouble,’ murmed Dick, who was trotting next to Clinton, ‘is you’re too damned pig-headed to be satisfied with anything short of the impossible.’
    ‘It’s called optimism,’ replied Clinton, smiling in spite of himself.
    ‘Try a bit of the other. Expect the worst, and anything else is a pleasant surprise.’
    ‘You’re no more a fatalist than I am.’
    Dick shook his head as if in sorrow.
    ‘Expecting too much again. Just because I haven’t the sense to follow it myself, you brush aside my perfectly good advice.’ He paused as they reached the top of a rise. Ahead of them beyond the trees, the valley opened out into a wide blaze of dandelions and purpling heather. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ Lambert went on confidingly, ‘you’re one of the only two men I’ve ever met who doesn’t hold a quite different theory of life from the one he’s patently acting on.’
    ‘I wonder if I can guess who the other is.’
    Lambert shrugged modestly.
    ‘Myself?’
    ‘For a cynic, you’re a good friend, Dick.’
    Glancing in front, Clinton saw that the body of the man he had killed had slipped slightly on the limber, so that the gashed head hung down and lolled, knocking against the metal with each jolt of the wheels. A thin trickle of blood ran down from the forehead across the youth’s open eyes. Following the direction of Clinton’s gaze, Lambert touched his horse and rode up to the cornet immediately behind the gun-carriage. Clinton saw him point his whip at the corpses and heard him tell the cornet to cover them.
    On their return to barracks, Clinton warmly congratulated all ranks on the efficiency with which they had