The Golden Ocean. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ