The Wild Geese by Stanley J. Weyman — Read

Passive courage -- courage in circumstances in which a man cannot help himself, but must abide with bound hands whatever a frowning fortune and his enemy's spite threaten -- is so much higher a virtue than that which carries him through hot emprises, and is so much more common among women, that the palm for bravery may fairly be given to the weaker sex. True, it is not in the first face of danger that a woman shines; time must be given her to string her nerves. But grant time and there is no calamity so dreadful, no fate so abhorrent to trembling humanity, that a woman has not met it smiling: in the sack of cities, or in the slow agony of towns perishing of hunger, in the dungeon, or in the grip of disease.

The bravest men share this gift, and some whom the shock of conflict appals. Cammock and the Bishop belonged to the former class. Seized in a moment of activity, certain only that they were in hostile hands, and hurried, blind and helpless, to an unknown doom, they might have been pardoned had they succumbed to despair. But they did not succumb. The habit of danger, and a hundred adventures and escapes, had hardened them; they felt more rage than fear. Stunned for a moment by the audacity of the attack, and humiliated by its success, they had not been dragged a hundred yards before they began to reason and to calculate the chances. If the purpose of those into whose hands they had fallen were to murder them they would have been piked on the spot. On the other hand, if their captors' object was to deliver them to English justice, it was a long way to the Four Courts, and farther to Westminster. Weeks, if not months, must elapse before they stood at the bar on a capital charge; much water must flow under the bridges, and many a thing might happen, by force or fraud, in the interval.