Читать книгу The Golden Ocean - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 6

‘GOOD-BYE,’ THEY WERE ALL CRYING. ‘GOOD-BYE, PETER. Good-bye, good-bye.’ And he meant to call out ‘Good-bye’ again to all of them, but the lump in his throat choked the cry to no more than a squeak.

‘Good-bye, Peter,’ they were calling still; and clearly came after him the voice of old Turlough, ‘Peter, come home soon, with your pockets full of the Spanish gold.’

At the bottom of the hill, where the turning came, he looked round and saw the handkerchiefs waving white on the hillside and he held up his hand to wish them farewell: and he watched the twinkle of their waving, though it swam in his eyes, until the bend of the road and the long stack of turf hid them all from his sight.

Then it was the soft green of the crossroads by Joseph Noonan’s cabin and the women waving their blue shawls, and he had to collect himself to smile and call back.

‘And let you bring us the King of Spain’s bright crown,’ cried Pegeen Ban behind him.

‘Well, it has begun,’ he thought; but although he had looked forward to this day so much, the reflection that the adventure was now beginning left him strangely unmoved. The pain of leaving them all was so much greater than he had ever expected, and it almost daunted him: it quenched all the excitement that had kept him from sleeping these many nights past; and it left him quite desolate.

He stole a sideways look at Liam, but Liam, in delicacy, feigned to be absorbed in the buckle of his reins, and he said nothing. They rode on in silence, with nothing but the creak of leather and the deadened thrum of their horses’ hooves on the soft and grassy road.

After a long while Peter said to himself again, ‘Well, so it has begun,’ and again he wondered that the words should feel so commonplace and flat. Perhaps it was because he was still on such familiar ground, he thought, looking up from his horse’s mane: when you start out on a great adventure perhaps you expect everything to change all round you at once, and there is a feeling of something wrong in going over the country you know so well. He looked round, and indeed it was the same country that he had seen every day of his life: they were coming across the bog of Connveagh now, by the inland road, and already the sea was far away on the right hand: on the left the blue mountains of Slieve Donagh and Cruachan ran up, smooth against the huge pale sky; and he knew that if he turned in his saddle he would see the far ash-trees that sheltered the Rectory of Ballynasaggart, where they would be sitting down to breakfast now. Before him the road ran on, faint through the dim rushes and the grass, to the sudden fall in the land where the bog of Connveagh left off and the Moin bog began; where the world stretched out, far and flat, to the edge of the sky, and over the Plain of the Two Mists there was a white haze never moving and not a single cabin, let alone a farm or a house, to be seen in the whole vast expanse—nothing but the pale flash of the water in the turf-cuttings and the shine of the creeping river.

It was a huge and a wild landscape, and one that a stranger might have found inhuman and desolate; but it was Peter’s own country, and he thought it no more saddening than the long cry of the curlews passing over behind them. And yet although it was so familiar, today he looked at it so hard that for a while he almost saw it with a stranger’s eye; but then the soft sea-rain drifted in across them and the distant country was lost in its fall.

It was not a cold rain; nor did it drive: they hardly noticed it weeping gently out of the sky, as it did for so many days in the year; but it matched with Peter’s state of mind and the song that Liam was half humming, half singing under his breath—the lament for the wild-geese, the exiles who never returned—and it made him, if anything, lower in his spirits than he was before.

They went on: on and on steadily through the small rain, and Peter was so wrapped in his thoughts that a figure leaping up at the side of the road brought the heart almost out of his mouth—a tall figure in a blue coat, springing out of a hole with a screech and flapping the sides of its cloak.

‘T’anam an Dial, omadhaun,’ cried Peter, quietening his horse; and, speaking still in Irish, he said, ‘What are you doing here at all, Sean? And have you no more sense than to be leaping out of a great hole, screeching and waving the sides of your cloak, which is not your cloak anyway but Patrick Kearney’s?’

‘You great fat thing,’ said Liam, frowning at his nephew. ‘What manners are these? Why are you carrying the shoes?’

‘I am coming too,’ said Sean with a grin, taking Peter’s stirrup-leather and urging the horse forward.

‘You are not,’ cried Peter and Liam together: the first said it in a wondering tone; the second without much conviction.

‘I am, too,’ said Sean, trotting evenly by the horse’s side with the shoes bumping rhythmically against his broad chest as they dangled from their string.

‘You are not,’ said his uncle again, but only from a spirit of contradiction.

‘I am,’ said Sean; and Peter, who knew that otherwise this conversation might continue indefinitely, interrupted with, ‘Did your father say you could go?’

Sean turned up his big open face and said, ‘And would I be so wicked and undutiful as to go off from my own country without my father’s permission and his Reverence’s blessing? Would I not think it the great shame for ever, to be stealing away like a polecat?’

At the sight of so much righteousness Peter was almost certain that Sean was lying, and he said directly, ‘Did your father truly say that you might go? And did my father approve?’

‘Ah,’ said Sean with a leap and a jerk that made Placidus stagger and change step. ‘Oh,’ he cried, ‘it is hard to be after running twenty miles across the mountain and over the bog and then to be called a renegado, no less.’

‘It is no more than seven,’ said Liam, ‘and he has no leave of anybody but the empty wind.’

‘Listen, Sean,’ said Peter. ‘Did your father say you could go?’

‘Am I not telling you?’ cried Sean, boiling with frustration and shaking the patient horse until it tottered. ‘Did I not say to my Da, “Will I go?” and did he not say, “You will”? And did not his Reverence encourage my heart with his noble description of the free and magnificent life in his royal Majesty’s imperial fleet? “Sail forth young man,” cries his reverend honour and he pacing back and forth in the small parlour itself. “Sail with the royal navy into the golden ocean, far into the golden sea.”’

‘“The golden ocean, the golden sea”,’ cried Peter. ‘Did he say that indeed, Sean, now?’

‘He did,’ said Sean, pleased with the reception of his words. ‘“Sail on the golden waves of the west until you can touch the sun with your hand,” says he, “and my younger son Peter, that elegant boy, will give you his protection if you attend to your duty.”’

‘It does not sound like my father—God bless him—at all….’

‘God bless him,’ they cried, Liam raising his hat.

‘… except for the ocean, the broad, golden sea.’ Peter went on. ‘He was saying a word of the same kind to me, about a golden voyage and a place called Colchis—he was saying that I must make my way there myself.’

‘It is to Cork we are going,’ said Liam in a pragmatical tone—‘to Cork by way of Derrynacaol: and not to any Colchis at all.’

‘Where is this Colchis?’ asked Sean, intensely interested.

‘Oh, in Greece, sure, or somewhat behind it,’ said Peter. ‘It is all in the book. But I do not have it clear in my mind—there was this gold in the tree, and a dragon and a wise-woman who was beautiful, the king’s daughter. It is William who would tell it: he can read the Greek and the Latin like any archbishop.’

‘It was long ago, I am sure?’

‘Why, surely it must have been.’

‘Before Saint Patrick, maybe?’

‘Perhaps so, Sean—very likely indeed, from what I recall.’

‘In the time of the Tuatha De Danaan, perhaps it was?’

‘Ah, Sean, I cannot tell you. You should ask William—he is the great scholar, with his podarkees Achilles and his hic hac horum.’

‘I wish,’ said Sean, looking down for a while and watching his bare feet running—‘I wish I could read the Greek.’

‘Read the Greek, is it?’ cried Liam with strong indignation. ‘Oh, the serpent. The impudent toad. Many and many a time have I said to my poor sister—and she quite demented with tales of his misconduct—I have said to her, “If you will not cut the comb of that young cock he will end on the gallows, like many another unpromising reptile, and then we’ll hear of him going for a soldier in King Lewis’s army of Papists, where he will be knocked on the head out of hand and shot through the body with flintlocks and pikes. He will be brought back and tried for foreign enlistment and treason and they will hang him at the four roads of Ballynasaggart. Let him be put to a respectable master,” I said, “and let us hear no more of this running up and down and playing the fiddle and making of rhymes or jingles in Irish—it is bad enough to be speaking it in private the way no one can hear us, but to write it in sheets …”’

‘What is wrong with the Gaelic?’

‘It is a language of servants. And it is not good enough even for them. What kind of a place can a servant get and he speaking nothing but Irish like something that has come in out of the bog?’

‘It was once the language of kings.’

‘I spit on your kings. It was never the language of commerce.’

‘It is the language they are speaking in Paradise.’

‘It is not. Some few very poor and ignorant angels with hardly a feather on them yet might still speak a few words of it in the dark corners of Heaven; but the language that is rightly spoken there, is the English.’

‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘Irish is good enough for me.’

‘Your honour will please himself,’ said Liam sharply, ‘but when we meet the young gentleman in Derrynacaol I hope that your father’s son will not make me blush by speaking the servants’ language.’

‘But Sean now,’ cried Peter, returning to the point that had been at the back of his mind, ‘if my father said all this, why did he not tell me? And why did you not start with us? You might have borrowed Clancy’s mare, and your uncle Liam would have taken her back with Placidus. And what is your baggage apart from Patrick Kearney’s cloak for such an enormous voyage—and I wish you may have got it from him fairly. Have you a letter at least to recommend you to Mr Walter, Sean?’

‘I have the shoes,’ replied Sean, ‘and before Derrynacaol I will be putting them on.’

Derrynacaol: it was two full days’ journey from Ballynasaggart to Derrynacaol, far out of the country of Peter’s knowledge, but they were to try to reach it in a day and a half, for the great horse-fair was held at that time of the year and it would have been the world’s pity to pass by without seeing anything of it. They would arrive in the afternoon of Wednesday if they travelled by moonlight, and they would be in time for the races.

‘It is the race they call the Town Race that we must see,’ said Liam as they went up the white road of Slieve Alan, ‘for that is the great race and the town gives a silver bell to the winner.’

‘Are they very fine horses, Liam?’

‘Are they very fine horses? They are the best in the world, my dear, fit for Julius Caesar or the Lord Lieutenant, and there is half Ireland lining the course and cheering the winner. Why, even the worst and the last of the creatures that run there would be like a comet in Ballynasaggart and it would put the mock on Cormac O’Neil’s brown gelding, the ill-shaped thief.’

‘I wish I could ride in a race like that,’ said Sean, who was up behind his uncle for a rest from the road.

‘Pooh,’ said Liam. ‘A great long-boned, tick-bellied slob of a thing like you? Those tall and stately magnificent horses would bend to the earth. No indeed: unless the gentry who own them are as light as may be they have little jockey-boys who weigh no more than an owl. For they are mad to win this race, do you see? And not an ounce will they carry that they can spare. It is not only the honour of bearing the bell away, but each gentleman pays five guineas to enter and each lord ten, and the winner takes all—and there are the side-stakes too, and the betting: but I’ll say no more of that.’

‘And why will you not?’

‘Because it’s there is the evil side of racing. Did his Reverence never tell you how wicked it is to gamble? And do I not tell you it is foolish as well, and I the best judge of a horse in the County Galway, if not in the whole of Connaught, whatever Cormac O’Neil may say. No: it is a fine and laudable sight, the glorious creatures, and then there is the piping and the dancing; but the betting and the wickedness—there’s folly for you, and under his Reverence’s command there will be none of it; nor any truck with the thimble-riggers and the common coney-catchers. And while I have it in my mind I will warn you against the pick-pockets that swarm at the fair. You must keep your hands in your pockets, or they will certainly steal the teeth out of your head. Indeed, they may do so even then, for there was a man from Dungannon who had the wig snatched from his poll in the hurly-burly by the winning-post, and he holding his pockets with might and main; which I had from his aunt in Dungannon itself: so if you have any money or valuable thing upon you at all, give it to me and I will carry it in the purse, God shield us from harm. For you cannot conceive of their wickedness.’

‘God between us and evil,’ they said, and Peter handed him a thick cart-wheel of a crown piece which had been trundling round the family for several years, going from John to William to Sophia to Rachel to Dermot to Hugh to Laetitia; and Peter had it now from William, it being given to each on his birthday by the previous holder and kept for the next, a treasured possession, too valuable ever to spend yet giving a most agreeable feeling of wealth, rare in a country clergyman’s family; and Liam pulled up the purse by the string round his neck—the purse where the few hard-saved guineas for the journey lay warm and bright in their leather bag—and put the crown piece in. He looked at Sean, who avoided his eye, and then at Peter again. ‘There are your buckles,’ he said.

‘Faith, so there are,’ cried Peter, clapping his hand to his throat. ‘But come, Liam,’ he said, after a moment’s thought, ‘they’ll not be stealing the buckles off my shoes or my breeches, I’m sure, for they are only cut steel. But will I give you the one from my stock?’

‘A fig for the glass bauble: but your shoe-buckles look like silver almost, and you had best take them off. And the ones from your knees.’

‘Sure, Liam, I won’t. How can I go into Derrynacaol—which is like Nineveh that great city, no doubt, from all that you tell me—to meet Mr FitzGerald without a buckle at all?’

‘They will steal the ears off a rat.’

‘Well, they may steal the coat off my back, but I’ll not go into Derrynacaol naked for all that. And so I defy them, Liam.’

‘Prudence, Mr Peter, is—’ began Liam, but at this moment they reached the gentle top of the round green hill and there below them lay the green plain all open to the watery sun, and the shining river far below.

‘There it is,’ cried Liam, pointing away to a dark mass in the middle distance, where the haze of smoke drifted over the houses. ‘There’s Derrynacaol.’

‘That?’ asked Peter.

‘It’s a little small place, so it is,’ said Sean.

‘It’s a village, is it?’ cried Liam in a passion. ‘It’s a huddle of cabins, is it? A claddach, perhaps? Are there no eyes in your head to see the pompous great steeple and the elegant courthouse? Though it is true,’ he said more coolly, ‘that not much of it shows from here. But there, look now, on the other side of the river—do you see in the bow of the river?—that great round of green half the size of America. Well, that is the race-course alone!’

‘Is it, then?’ cried Peter, astonished.

‘It is, too,’ replied Liam, appeased, ‘and the best race-course in Heaven is scarcely more handsome or vast.’

‘Oh, it’s I’ll be there first,’ cried Sean, slipping down and starting to run.

Sean was the best runner for twenty parishes—and it was said in Ballynasaggart that if he desired a change in his victuals he had but to run at full speed to catch a snipe in the one hand and a cock in the other—and he took a great start on them. He was quite out of view for a while, although they travelled on briskly: there were some people on the road now, which was a change after the bare and mountainy country, and they were all hurrying, pressing forward with their faces towards Derrynacaol; there were donkey-carts and horsemen and nearer the town many people on foot, but never a hint of Sean did they see until they were close to the very door of the inn. He had put on the shoes well outside the town, not to disgrace his company; but they were the family shoes of a numerous clan or sept whose members differed much in size, and although they increased Sean’s outward glory they added nothing to his comfort at all and the last half-mile had flayed the hide off his spirit as he minced along on tip-toe. Indeed he was so reduced that he was glad to hobble into the stable, and all the while Peter was changing he lay on a heap of straw with his feet in the air while a compassionate ostler from Tuam pumped a jet of cool water over them.

This changing was Liam’s idea, and he insisted upon it although Peter was boiling to be at the fair. ‘It may very well be that you will meet with Mr FitzGerald,’ he said, ‘and you would not wish us all to be shamed with your old frieze coat: besides, there are the lords and the gentry from all the country and their ladies like peacocks for glory—it will never do to show like a scrub.’

As he spoke he unpacked, spreading Peter’s best coat and polishing the buttons on his sleeve, breathing heavily to make them shine: so Peter made the best of it and when it was over he was glad he had done it, for not only was Liam’s satisfaction plain on his face—and it is always pleasant to please your own people—but for his own part he felt more confident and worldly: and indeed he was a creditable figure to come from an isolated parsonage at the remotest edge of the poorest diocese in the western world. His long-skirted blue coat (handed down from Cousin Spencer), his embroidered waistcoat and his buff breeches (William’s by rights, but pressed into his Majesty’s service for the occasion) were all the product of devoted cutting-down and needling and threading at home, but they looked quite as if they had come from a tailor’s hands; and his gay waistcoat, which represented seven months of loving toil on the part of Laetitia, was finer than any tailor could have produced, particularly as her affectionate zeal had carried the pattern as far as his shoulder-blades, whereas embroidery usually stops at one’s ribs. And as for his linen, that had been grown and retted and spun and woven and tented and bleached entirely at home, and Solomon had no finer linen than that of Ballynasaggart, nor finer lace (if Solomon ever wore lace, which is doubtful indeed) than that which came from the bobbins and pins of Pegeen Ban to hang in a spidery web at Peter’s throat and his wrists.

‘Your mother would be proud,’ said Liam, tying Peter’s hair in the black ribbon behind.

‘But fine clothes are a vanity,’ said Peter, looking with furtive approval into the glass.

‘Sure it’s the coat that makes the man,’ replied Liam, holding his head on one side. ‘Why you might be the son of a bishop, or at least of a dean. I’m glad now that I did not take the buckles away, so I am.’

‘Ah, the buckles,’ said Peter, putting his hand to his throat. ‘I wish you may not be right about the thieves at the fair.’

‘Pooh,’ said Liam, ‘they’ll not take that thing, for sure. Why will you wear it at all, the green glass?’ He peered at the kind of a buckle in Peter’s stock: it was there more by way of an ornament in his jabot than a thing of utility, and Liam thought it looked incorrect.

‘Mother Connell gave it me for a luck-bringer,’ said Peter, with an obstinate look.

‘The old dark creature,’ cried Liam. ‘She should be burnt on a faggot.’

‘She should not,’ cried Peter.

‘Yes she should,’ said Liam. ‘The witch.’

Peter made no reply for the moment, while he thought about the old strange yellow-faced woman who lived in a desolate cabin beyond the round tower by the sea: in a curious way they were friends; sometimes he brought her fish from the sea, and although she talked to nobody else—even hid when the Rector came by—she would tell him long tales of Cromwell’s time, when she was a girl, and of ancient kings.

‘She had it from her grandmother,’ he said, ‘and she thought it came from the Spanish ship. And I tell you what, Liam, she’ll hear what you say if you do not take care.’

Made bold by the distance Liam snapped his finger and thumb. ‘Little I care for all she may do, the black witch,’ he said, ‘and that green gawd is only some fairing she stole as a girl if ever she was one and not born as old as a crow, which I doubt.’

A distant roaring came through the low window. ‘They are beginning a race,’ cried Liam, on fire to be gone. ‘Will I wait by the door while you put on your shoes?’

At the door he may have waited for a time that seemed long to him, but he was gone when Peter came down, though he had been upstairs only the time it took to ram his feet into his shoes, to rip the left one off in order to remove the shoe-horn, and to put the shoe on again: there was Sean still there however, hovering on the door-step and peering impatiently back into the hall and then out over the heads of the crowd.

‘There’s the Lord-Lieutenant’s own cousin has just gone by,’ he cried on seeing Peter arrive, ‘in a coach and six with outriders and footmen galore.’

‘Where?’ asked Peter, staring into the river of men and horses and asses and carts.

‘There,’ cried Sean, darting into the throng as a coach-horn brayed out loud and high, and Peter saw him no more.

Peter hesitated for a moment, but the tide of people was setting strongly down towards the church and he joined in the wake of a party of butchers, who were marching down the middle of the street, clashing their marrow-bones and cleavers and from time to time uttering a concerted shriek.

‘They must know where they are going,’ observed Peter to himself, as he stepped over a blind-drunk soldier lying at peace in the gutter: and he was right, for in a few minutes they had traversed the little town and he was in the tight-packed jostling crowd that lined the green race-course. They were all waiting on the edge and staring away to the right, and Peter wriggled and thrust his way through until he could see the green grass from under the arm of a gigantic seller of tripe; he was half-deafened by the talk and the shouting, but above it all he heard a great roar that swelled, mounting and mounting until it was caught up by the people all about him, and in another moment he saw the horses all close together racing down like a wave of the sea. Then they were passing him with a thunder and pounding and the green turf flew from under their hoofs and Peter found that he was shouting at the top of his lungs and although he could not hear a sound of his voice he could feel the vibration. And they were gone, leaning in on the curve, the beautiful horses, and there was nothing but the brown earth where they had passed and the shouting died away.

Peter began to recover his breath. ‘The roan won,’ he was crying to the world in general when the words were jerked back down his throat and his hat banged down over his ears as the tripe man brought down the arm that he had been waving these ten minutes past.

‘Did you see him?’ cried the tripe man, picking him up and abstractedly straightening his hat. ‘Did you see Pat in his glory a-riding the roan?’ He screeched out a kind of halloo and quietly observed, ‘He’s my own sister’s son, the joy, and I am a ten-pounder this minute, a propertied man. However, I am sorry I beat down your honour’s fine hat: and will you take a piece of the tripe—it was Foylan’s young bullock and one of the best—or a craubeen for love, with the service of Blue Edward, your honour, the propertied man?’

Peter did not wish to seem proud, still less to offend the good man, so he accepted the pig’s foot, wrapped the end of it in his handkerchief to keep it from his flowered waistcoat and wandered away into the dispersing crowd. It was now that he found the stalls of fairings and gingerbread, the fire-eater and the sword-swallowing marvel from the County Fermanagh, for they were placed in irregular lanes on the outside of the great expanse of grass, all trodden now into a dun-coloured plain, smelling like all fairs in the open and resounding with the cries of the men with raree-shows, two-headed calves, the great hen of the Orient, admired by the Pope himself and the college of Cardinals, performing fleas and medicines for the moon-pall and the strong fives. He also saw the pea-and-thimble man against whom Liam had warned him, and a gentleman who promised a guinea for sixpence, if only you could pin a garter in a certain way, which seemed quite easy—so easy that Peter regretted his crown. ‘For,’ he thought, ‘there are ten sixpences in a crown, and with ten guineas I could buy such fairings for Sophy and Rachel and Dermot and Hugh and the rest.’

However, nobody ever seemed to win the guinea, except for an old little wizened man, who was strongly suspected of being the garter’s father.

‘Sure the old thief is the garter’s own Da,’ said an indignant grazier from Limerick, who had lost three shillings clear, and in the momentary silence that followed these ominous words the gambling man cried, ‘Fair, fair, all fair; fair as the Pope’s election and the course of the stars: come, who’s for a nobleman’s chance at a guinea? Pin him through, pin him fair and the guinea is yours—will you watch how I do it and do the same, so?’ And catching Peter’s eye he said, ‘Let the young gentleman have a try for his craubeen alone—I’ll not ask a penny, but accept of the elegant foot, always providing he has not bitten it yet.’

‘Ha ha ha,’ went the crowd, forgetting its wrath, and Peter, with all eyes upon him, started back, feeling wonderfully and undeservedly foolish.

‘Why, young squire, never blush; come up and never show bashful,’ cried the showman, and Peter felt his face growing redder.

‘Down with the gambling,’ he thought to himself; and leaving the crowd he hurriedly veiled the trotter and thrust it down into his pocket.

He walked quickly away past the fortune-tellers and the double-jointed prophetical Hungarian dwarf from Dublin, then more slowly through the real business of the fair, the long lines where grooms led and ran horses up and down before the gaze of knowing, horse-faced men; and so, forgetting his vexation, he drifted on to the blue booth where a shanachy was telling a story, accompanying himself with twangs on a harp, fierce or pathetic as the matter required.

He had seen everything, and two races more, including the last, when it occurred to him that he might find Sean over where the dancing was, and the pipes. But though he scanned the rings of dancers in the ceilidhe, admiring their steps, he saw nothing of Sean; nor did he find him at the big enclosure for the wrestling; and now that the main events of the day were done the shebeens with their whiskey were beginning their trade and already there were men drunk on the ground. Yet it would have been strange if Peter had not been used to that; and tranquilly avoiding two fights and a small riot he made his way slowly back to the inn.

It took him some time to find it, for there were more people than he had ever seen in the world quite filling the streets, and everywhere there was the confusing babble of voices, English and all the accents of Irish and even the dark speech of some horse-dealing strangers; but suddenly he was facing the open door of the courtyard, and right in front of him were his two missing followers.

‘Listen, Peter a gradh,’ said Sean, much agitated; ‘listen, you’ll not be angry now?’

‘Why would I be angry, Sean?’ asked Peter, frowning and staring after Liam’s hurrying back.

‘Sure my uncle’s the great judge of a horse,’ said Sean. ‘It is in his nature to judge them with skill.’

‘Oh,’ said Peter, doubting the worst.

‘And there was this grand spotted horse as tall as a church,’ said Sean, ‘and he, regarding its legs and considering their strength, said the horse could run faster than the others. And sure it ran like the wind.’

‘Did it, Sean?’ cried Peter, brightening. ‘But there was another ran faster, maybe?’

‘Not at all, not at all. My uncle Liam was right and the great spotted horse ran—it flew, never touching the earth. The other horses, you would have said it was assess they were, barely creeping along.’

‘Well then?’

‘But—you’ll never be furious now, nor wicked?—they crept in the right direction, while the great spotted horse went away through the crowd to the river, for he scorned to compete with them, and the little jockey-boy sawing at the bridle in vain in vain. They are probably in the County Tyrone by now.’

‘Did he lose a great deal, Sean?’ asked Peter.

‘He did not,’ said Sean: but from something in his manner Peter took no comfort from his words, and after a second Sean went on, ‘He could not, indeed: at that time he lost nothing at all, the way he had—but you’ll not grow outrageous? Sure you’ll be kind to my uncle and he brokenhearted?’

‘Sean,’ said Peter, laying his hand on his arm, ‘you’ll not tell me that they had his pocket picked?’ In that moment Peter had divined the fact; and as if Sean had replied he went on, ‘And yet it was hung round his neck.’

‘He had brought it out to be flashing the gold,’ said Sean.

‘Well—’ said Peter; but instead of finishing his remark he took a turn up and down the yard.

‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘there is only the one thing to do. On the eighteenth day of this month I must be in Cork: there is no time to go back, and besides my poor dear father—no, what we must do is to sell Liam’s horse; and I believe that if we find the right man and you ride with care to show him to his best advantage, the creature, we may get two guineas perhaps. It is a grave step to take—why, Sean, what’s the matter?’

‘Gone,’ whispered Sean. ‘Pawned.’

‘And Placidus too?’

Sean nodded. ‘With the gombeen-man of Athy,’ he said. ‘But not sold.’

Peter opened his mouth; but closed it again and paced up and down in the yard.

‘And the baggage too, I suppose?’ he asked after a dozen turns.

Sean nodded. ‘It was his last stroke to win it all back,’ he said.

Peter renewed his pacing. ‘Well,’ he said, pausing on a turn, ‘at least Placidus is not sold: that would have wounded my father’s heart.’

Three turns later he said, ‘And with the luck of the world—thanks be to God—’

‘Thanks on high,’ said Sean.

‘I had shifted into my best clothes, so they are not lost, and I can face the Commodore.’

And after another three turns he suddenly cried, ‘I have it, Sean: I have our salvation. This Mr FitzGerald I am to meet in the evening; he’s sure to be rich—I’ll ask him to lend me five guineas or six. That will bear our charges and unpawn Placidus. Ha ha, Sean—that’s the way of it,’ he exclaimed, clapping Sean on the shoulder.

‘Hoo hoo,’ cried Sean, with a hoot of triumph and relief, his spirits mounting directly. ‘Sure he’ll be delighted to oblige a companion and he the richest man’s son in the West, no doubt, if not close kin to the Deputy.’

‘You have not seen him come to the inn?’ asked Peter, reflecting.

‘I have not,’ replied Sean, ‘but will I ask of the grooms? He’ll surely have servants before and behind, and his horses may be filling the stables at this very minute, the valuable beasts.’

‘Do that thing,’ said Peter, ‘and if you have news of him come and whisper to me privately. I will sit in the great room of the inn.’