The Golden Ocean Read Online Free PDF Page B

slept secure, for, as Sean said, ‘Wisha, your honour, the magistrate’s word goes no further than the edge of the county, and although the dear knows you cannot go back, you may go forward as far as ever you please.’
    They slept secure from arrest, but not from the rain: and in the sodden dawn Peter thanked his kind fate for a follower so foreseeing as Sean, who in their hurried departure had had the wit to whip up the wooden bottle that Mrs Palafox had provided for Peter’s morning draught. Now the fiery whiskey bored down his throat and lit up his stomach, preserving him from the noxious damp.
    ‘That is far better,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘But I wish—’ His words were cut short by the sight of Sean, who appeared suddenly on a naked rock above them: the wind was holding his long cloak straight up in the air, increasing his already considerable height to ten feet and more: his black hair also streamed up, and his blue eyes were glaring down in a hard, inimical, piercing way at a stranger far below them; and the reason for this was that the hare which had hitherto been concealed under his cloak was now entirely open to view. The inoffensive, uninquisitive stranger passed on his harmless way, and Sean came down.
    ‘If you did that on my father’s land,’ said FitzGerald, picking a clean bone of the half-smoked hare (it is hard to light a good fire when even your flint and steel drip wet on being shaken), ‘you would find yourself transported before you could very well bless the Pope. He is a Papist, I suppose?’ he asked Peter, nodding towards Sean in the manner typical of his kind.
    ‘He is not,’ said Peter, shortly.
    ‘Well, he is a wonderful poacher for a Protestant,’ said FitzGerald.
    ‘The mist is lifting,’ said Peter. It was: it tore and parted as they watched, thinner, and at last so sparse and rare that it was no more than a few wisps between their hilltop and the great plain of Ireland with the white road winding away, far below.
    ‘What shall we do now?’ asked Peter, more to himself than FitzGerald or Sean, after he had gazed at this sight for a while.
    ‘What we ought to do is go down there to the road and walk steadily towards the south,’ said FitzGerald. ‘It will dry us, perhaps, if the rain does not come back; and at least I am sure it will diminish the distance between us and Cork.’
    ‘I tell you what, Palafox,’ he said again, when they were down out of the sopping heather and the patches of rust-coloured bog and on the dry road, ‘it is an infernal thing not being able to go back to Derry: I have just thought of a prodigious fine notion, if only we were there. You could go round to all the parsons’ houses and tap them for five guineas apiece.’
    ‘Listen,’ said Peter, in a pitying voice. ‘Do you really think there is a parsonage in all the West with five guineas in it at one time?’
    ‘There are two in Derrynacaol,’ said FitzGerald. ‘My cousin is the Bishop of Clonfert, and I know the value of the livings there. There are a couple of charming snug places in Derry: I wish I had gone into the Church. But not hereabouts, ‘tis true,’ he said, looking forward to the thin and deserted country that lay far before them. ‘Here they live somehow on twenty or thirty a year.’
    ‘Perhaps I should go back and try,’ said Peter, standing in the road.
    ‘No,’ said FitzGerald, ‘it would not do at all. They would nab you at once and then it would be days and days of finding surety of good behaviour and all that. You would never reach Queenstown in time, to say nothing of being arrested for debt at the inn. I am sorry, upon my honour, for it is all in my quarrel: but a second is as much troubled as a principal in a duel.’
    They walked on in silence. Peter thought of Placidus. He thought of Liam. And he thought, with a sudden gasp of realisation, that his whole prayed-for, cherished, unexpectedly lucky chance of a career in the