Читать книгу The Small Dark Man (Maurice Walsh) (Literary Thoughts Edition) - Maurice Walsh - Страница 15

III

He stood leg-wide on the path, fingers smoothing his short hairs, and watched the tall figure fade into the grey of the hills. He was gone now, as if propelled from behind, and Hugh Forbes had to decide on his own course. That was not so easy. First of all, he would pick his old burberry out of the heather and see what damage had befallen his Abernethy biscuits and cheese. They were not bruisther at any rate. Ah! but where were his hat and his ash-plant? His fine new hat! Twenty-five shillings at Liam Flannery’s sale—forty-five in Grafton Street, Dublin, Liam had said, but he was a thundering liar. Fell on the floor, it had, back there with that long-legged—female. And why did it fall off?—it had a bad habit of falling off at the wrong time. Perhaps some god or imp flicked it with a finger . . . not a leaf shall fall . . . not a leaf shall fall. Still, it was his own and only hat, and—in spite of the devil’s mother—he would go back for it, and his ash-plant too. And, anyway, he could come away his own road when he liked, and he could be very circumspect and say nothing, or next to nothing. Ay, nothing! Damn you, Hughie, when it comes to saying nothing you talk like hell. Queer, all the same, how that long fellow went off down the glen and a good-looking jade—good-looking enough at any rate—back there in the bothy and not averse to his company. Maybe that was the reason. . . . A great pity that grey eyes held no secret! Fred he called her. Something wrong with a man who would shorten a grand name like that. Frances Mary! A darling name. . . .

He plodded slowly, one foot over the other, back up the glen, his eyes downcast and his mind pursuing thought into the byways where philosophy is only folly, and reason a shadow, and cause and effect reach fore and aft into infinity—and do not matter.