The Golden Ocean Read Free Page 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 abishop, 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