THE SEA.
After a few more words of no interest with Gorman, Jerry O'Brien went
into the private office of O'Hanlon, and found that gentleman
encircled by hedges of legal documents, fast asleep, with a newspaper
before him. The opening of the door roused the solicitor, who
straightway sprang to his feet, exclaiming:
"My dear O'Brien, delighted to see you! Sit down. I'll be back in a
moment."
He left the room, hastened into the outer office, asked Gorman what
o'clock it was, and if the mail had been delivered yet, and then
hurried back to his client, saying:
"Excuse my running away; there was something I had to say to my clerk.
Now, how are you? What kind of a night had you?"
"I'm quite well, and had an excellent night. And you?"
"Oh, bad, bad! Nothing could be much worse. I didn't get an hour's
sleep. I was dozing as you came in. Don't say anything about it.
Remember your promise! But I am sure I am breaking down. I am certain
I shall break down mentally soon."
"Nonsense!" cried O'Brien, cheerfully. "I am not going to listen to
that rubbish in the noonday."
"And a beautiful noonday it is," said O'Hanlon, looking out into the
meagrely illumined back-yard, with its grass-green water-butt resting
unevenly on its grass-green stand; its flower-pots three-quarters full
of completely sodden clay; its brokenhearted, lopsided, bedraggled
whisk, reclining dejectedly partly against the humid white wall and
partly against the bulged and staring water-butt; its dilapidated
wooden shed that did not go through the farce of sheltering anything
from the universal moisture save a battered watering-pot without a
rose; and its ghastly six-foot-high _arbor vitæ_--a shrub which makes
even summer sunshine look dull.
"I've been looking over the papers you lent me, and I had a chat with
Gorman before I came into this room. Gorman told me more of Davenport
and long ago than I knew up to this. But I can make nothing of your
old client, and am sure the apparition was the result of pure nervous
relaxation."
"But, confound it, my dear O'Brien, can't you see extreme mental
relaxation is what I am in dread of?"
"Well, then, I won't say that. I'll say it was pure or impure liquor,
or liver, or anything you like. Of only one thing am I sure--namely,
that there was more than a little between this Fahey and Davenport."
"That's my own impression too; but I can make nothing of these
documents."
"It is not intended you should be able to make anything of them; and
if I were you, now that the two men concerned in them are dead and
done for, I'd bother no more about them."
"Get it out of your head for good and all, O'Brien, that I am
troubling about the men. I am not; I am troubling about myself. I am
afraid I am going to have something seriously wrong with my brain, and
that's not a comfortable thing for a man who is not yet old to get
into his mind."
"Well, I'm sure I don't know what to do. I have often heard it said
that one of the best ways to adopt in a case of this kind is to bring
the man face to face with the thing which causes him annoyance----"
"What! Bring me face to face with what I saw! I think, O'Brien, your
brain is giving way before merely the story of my troubles."
"No, no; I mean to set you face to face with the scene of your
adventure, and then when you perceive nothing unusual there, you will
be less disturbed by the memory of your last visit than you are now. I
myself am curious to look at the place once more. Will you drive over
with me now, and put your mind at rest for ever?"
He spoke earnestly, considerately.
O'Hanlon thought a moment, and then said with a sigh, followed by a
lugubrious smile:
"I don't know about putting my mind at rest, but I think the drive
would do me good. I have been staying too much indoors of late. Yes,
I'll go. I'll be ready in half-an-hour. Call for me then, and I'll
have a car waiting outside. I hope the weather will keep up."
O'Brien called at the time appointed, and they drove away towards
Kilcash.
When they cleared the city, their road lay through miles of bog and
marsh, in which nothing grew but flags and osiers and bulrushes, with
here and there patches of thin rank grass. The causeway along which
they drove had been formed of the earth obtained from cuttings on each
side of it, and these cuttings made long straight lines of dreary
canals, uncheered by traffic. Snipe, and duck, and cranes were to be
seen here, but the ground was rotten, and, in places, dangerous. As
far as the eye could reach no human habitation was to be seen. On one
of these canals a poor hare-brained enthusiast had built a small mill,
now fallen into the last stage of decay. The useless water had no
power to turn the useless wheel. Now and then a bald gray rock rose a
few feet above the flat monotony of the swamp. To right and left, low
green hills touched the leaden sky. All in front and behind was
cheerless, unbroken morass.
The air was heavy with moisture, but no rain fell. The iron rails,
woodwork, and cushions of the car were clammy to the touch. The
horse's head drooped as he plodded spiritlessly along the dark, miry
road. The driver wore an oilcap, oilskin coat, and had a heavy,
sodden, yellow rug about his knees. He used the whip with monotonous
regularity and monotonous absence of result. The horse seemed to feel
that not even man could be in a hurry on such a day. There was no
movement in sky, or air, or on the land. The car startled two cranes
that were fishing by the side of the road. They rose and fled with
such intolerable slowness as proclaimed their belief that no creature
which had once gone beneath could ever get from under the flat
pressure of those purposeless clouds--could ever shake off the slimy
unctuousness of the land.
The two travellers sat back to back, holding their heads forward
against the soft, clinging, clammy air. They scarcely spoke a word the
whole way. The landscape afforded no subject for pleasant remark, and
the younger man did not care to make matters gloomier. He had nothing
new to communicate, so he smoked in silence. The elder man could not
rouse himself to take an interest in any subject not immediate to
himself, and the driver was half asleep.
At last the ground began to rise very gradually. They were getting
near the sea. The air grew lighter, fresher, brisker. A thin white
vapour lay upon the marsh and rolled slowly inward, yet no wind could
be felt. The air had grown much warmer, and although the dull pall of
leaden sky still spread unbroken above, it could be felt that sunlight
existed somewhere overhead. The bleak vacuity of an overcast winter
day was being insensibly filled with assurances of activity and life,
and from the wide sweep of the full horizontal front there was the
breath, the inchoate murmur as though the leaves of a hundred thousand
trees felt the approach of wind. That was the fine, broad, opening
phrase of the diapason tones drawn by the ocean from the shore in its
portentous prelude to the silence of eternity.
Higher and higher they crawled slowly, gradually, until they could
tell what part of the sky lay over the sea by reason of its greater
whiteness.
And now the various movements in the orchestra of the sea began to
assemble and marshal before their ears. Here the shrill silver hiss of
the long waves toppling in curved cascades, and running swiftly inland
on the sand. Here the roar and rattle of stubborn boulders torn from
their rocky holds by the mad out-wash of the shattered wave. Here the
low hollow groaning of protesting caves, vocal, inscrutable. Afar off
the deep boom of the mighty wave, which, gliding up to the land, a
green, unbroken mound of water, flung itself in white, impotent rage
against the unrepining, unappalled, forlorn cliffs, and made the air
thunder with mutinous clamour.
There was no storm--nothing beyond the ordinary winter roller of the
Atlantic.
The car stopped, and the two friends descended.
"It's only a few hundred yards from this to the cliff over the Black
Rock," said the driver. "But it's lonely there on a day like this.
Don't go down. Don't trust yourself on that rock a day like this. She
may begin any minute a day like this, and if she catches you between
her and the water, you're dead men."
The two friends struck across the downs, the younger leading the way.