He hid himself in a house at Harold’s Cross, where he had masqueraded once before, when his country’s need constrained him. Now he was there chiefly because the road in front ran towards Rathfarnham, and because, at least, he could sometime or other watch his own dear love go by. A servant, a peasant wench who was devoted to him, Anne Devlin, carried letters under her apron to the Priory, carried letters “richer than Ind” back to the proscribed master. She was a neighbouring dairyman’s daughter, and her coming and going were unquestioned. Forty years after, in her pathetic old age, she told Dr. Madden how Miss Sarah’s emotion would all but betray her: “When I handed her a letter, her face would change so, one would hardly know her.” And again: “Miss Sarah was not tall, her figure was very slight, her complexion dark, her eyes large and black, and her look was the mildest, the softest, and the sweetest look you ever saw!” All this is beautifully borne out by the Romney portrait, save that the pensive face which Romney must have begun to paint before the time of her betrothal (for after 1799 he painted hardly at all) is not olive-skinned and not black-eyed. The eyes are, in truth, very dark, but of Irish violet-grey. Every Anne Devlin in the world would have called them “black.” But one hastens to contradict a hasty phrase: there is but one Anne Devlin, a soul beyond price, who suffered afterwards and without capitulation, for her “Mr. Robert’s” sake, tortures of body and mind which read like those in the _Acta Sanctorum_. Her name will be with his when that “country shall have taken her place among the nations of the earth;” until then there is no fear but that those who care for him will keep a little candle burning to his most heroic friend.
At every house where Emmet lived, as “Mr. Huet” or “Mr. Ellis,” during his fugitive and perilous months, he had his romantic trap-doors, and removable wainscots, and sliding panels. Even at Casino, his own home in the country, closed after his father’s death, with its summer-house and decaying garden, he provided like subterfuges and inventions of his own, for he had a turn for mechanism as well as for the plastic arts. It is hard to be both a hunted rebel and an anxious lover, to have equal necessity for staying in and for sallying forth! Just so had “Lord Edward,” dear to every one who knew him, managed to exist, in and out of a hole, before his seizure and death. It has been justly said that “a system of government which could reduce such men as Robert Emmet and Lord Edward Fitzgerald to live the life of conspirators, and die the death of traitors, is condemned by that alone.” It seems hardly possible but that Robert and his Sarah made out to meet again, as they had met after the lamentable no-rising, when for a night and a morning he had lingered in the alarmed city before escaping into the mountains. One may be not far wrong in believing that the girl was by this time too overwrought, dismayed, and grief-stricken, to come to any immediate decision about joining him, and breaking away while there was yet opportunity. He must have realised fully the alternative, whether she did so or not, that to remain in Ireland was but to beckon on his fate. At any rate, on August 23, at his humble dining-table, he was suddenly apprehended. The informer has never been discovered; from the Secret Service Money books we know that he received his due £1000. The captor was Major Sirr, the unloved fowler of that other young eagle of insurrection but just mentioned, Lord Edward Fitzgerald. He was able to recognise Emmet by the retrospective description obligingly furnished by Dr. Elrington, Provost of Trinity, of an undergraduate whom he had not loved. The captive was bound and led away, bleeding from a pistol wound in the shoulder. He had tried to get off, and some rough treatment followed, for which apologies were tendered. “All is fair in war,” said the prince of courtesy. The Earl of Hardwicke, then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, writes two days after, in his usual covertly kind way, of the arrest of young Emmet, now consigned to Kilmainham Gaol on the charge of high treason. “I confess I had imagined that he had escaped,” he says to his brother, his confidential daily correspondent. “His having remained here looks as if he had been in expectation of a further attempt.” Not yet was the Lord Lieutenant aware of the love-story intertwined with the one-man insurrection.