The sea lay below, far below, and stretching like a sapphire meadow to
the rim of the world.
You could hear the song of the breakers in the cave and on the sand and
the cry of the seagulls from the cliff and rock, and the breeze amid the
cliff grass, but these sounds only emphasised the silence of the great
sunlit sapphire sea.
The sea is a very silent thing. Three thousand miles of pampas grass
would emit more sound under the lash of the wind than the whole Atlantic
Ocean, and a swallow in its flight makes more sound than the forty-foot
wave, that can wreck a pier or break a ship, makes in its passage
towards the shore.
Up here, far above the shore, the faint, sonorous tune of wave upon wave
breaking upon the sands below served only to accentuate the essential
silence of the sea.
Through this sound could be distinguished another, immense, faint,
dream-like--the breathing of leagues of coast; a sound made up of the
boom of billows in the sea caves, and the bursting of waves on rock and
strand, but so indefinite, so vague, that, listening, one sometimes
fancied it to be the wind in the bent grass, or a whisper from the
stunted firs on the landward side of the cliff.
Away out on the sparkling blue, the brown sails of fisher boats bound
for Bellturbet filled to the light wind, and a mile out from shore, and
stretching south-westward, the Seven Sisters rocks broke from the sea.
That was all. But it was immensely beautiful.
Nowhere else perhaps can you get such loneliness as here, on the west
coast of Ireland--loneliness without utter desolation. The vast shore,
left just as the gods hewed it in the making of the world, lies facing
the immense sea. They tell each other things. You can hear the billow
talking to the cave, and the cave to the billow, and the wind to the
cliff, and the wave to the rock, and the gulls lamenting. And you know
that it was all like this a thousand years and more ago, when Machdum
set his sails to the wind and headed his ship for the island.
Moriarty, leaving the donkey to nibble at the scant grass on the cliff
top, took his seat on the ground and began to cut a split out of the
blackthorn stick, while Miss French, with the reins in her hands, looked
about her and over the sea.
She could see a white ring round the base of each of the Seven Sisters
rocks; it was a ring of foam, for, placid though the sea looked from
these heights, a dangerous swell was running. Now and then, like a puff
of smoke, a ring of seagulls would burst out from the rocks, contract,
dissolve, and vanish. Now and then a great cormorant would pass the
cliff edge, sailing along without a movement of the wings, and sinking
from sight with a cry.
The sea breeze blew, bringing with it the crowning delight of the
cliff-top--the smell of the sea; the smell of a thousand leagues of
waves, the smell of seaweed from the shore, the smell that men knew and
loved a thousand years ago, the smell which is freedom distilled into
perfume and the remembrance of which makes us turn each year from the
land and seek the sea.
"Moriarty," said the child, "where are those ships going to?"
"Which ships?" asked Moriarty.
"Those ships with the brown sails to them."
"Limerick," replied Moriarty, without raising an eye from the job he was
on, or knowing in the least which way the ships were going, or whether
Limerick was by the sea or inland. Moriarty had a theory that one answer
was as good as another for a child as long as you satisfied it, and the
easiest answer was the best, because it gave you the least trouble.
Moriarty was not an educationist; indeed, his own education was of the
slightest.
"Why are they going to Limerick?" demanded Miss French.
"Why are they goin' to where?" asked Moriarty, speaking like a man in a
reverie and whittling away with his knife at the stick.
"Limerick."
"Sure, what else would they be goin' for but to buy cods' heads?"
"Why?" asked Miss French, who felt this answer to be both bizarre and
unsatisfactory.
"I dunno. I've never axed them."
This brought the subject to a cul-de-sac and brick wall.
And if you will examine Moriarty's answers you will find that he had
constructed an impregnable position, a glacis across which no child
would get a "why?"
Miss French ruminated on this for a moment, while Moriarty, having
finished his operations on the stick, tapped the dottle out of his pipe,
refilled it, and lit it.
Then, leaning on his elbow, he lay watching the ships going to Limerick,
and thinking about stable matters and Garryowen, the latest addition to
Mr. French's stable, in particular.
Moriarty had spotted Garryowen. It was by his advice that Mr. French had
bought the colt, and it was in his hands that the colt was turning into
one of the fleetest that ever put hoof to turf. Miss French watched her
companion, and they sat like this for a long, long time, while the wind
blew, and the sea boomed, and the gulls passed overhead, honey-coloured
where the sunlight pierced the snow of their wings.
"Moriarty," said the child at last, "how would you like to have a
governess?"
This question brought Moriarty back from his reverie, and he rose to his
feet.
"Come along," said he, taking the donkey's reins, "it's moidhered you'll
be gettin' with the sun on your head and you without a hat."
"I'm going to have a governess," said the child; "she's coming this day
week, and she's forty years old. What'll she be like, do you think,
Moriarty?"
"Faith!" said the evader of questions, "it's I that am thinkin' she
won't be like a rosebud."
Miss French drew a letter from the pocket of her skirt as Moriarty led
the donkey towards the path. It was a letter written purposely in a
large, round hand that a child could easily read; each character was
neatly printed, and though the contents were simple enough, the thing
spoke volumes about the good heart of the sender.
Mr. French was in Dublin, but every day during his absence he wrote his
little daughter a letter like this--a pleasant trait in a man living in
a world the keynote of which is forgetfulness of the absent. The child
read out the letter as Moriarty guided the donkey down the steep hill
path.
It was a funny letter. It began as though Mr. French were writing to a
child; it went on as though he were writing to an adult, and it finished
as though the age of his correspondent had just occurred to him. It told
of what he was doing in town--of a visit to Mr. Legge, the family
solicitor, and of bother about money matters.
"However," said Mr. French in one passage, "Garryowen will put that all
right."
As Miss French read this aloud Moriarty emphasised his opinion on the
matter by striking a drum note on the donkey's ribs with the butt of his
stick.
"I've got a governess for you at last," said Mr. French. "She's forty,
and wears spectacles. I haven't seen her, but I gather so from her
letter. She's coming from England this day week. I'll be back to-morrow
by the 5.30 train."
"That's to-day," said Miss French.
"I know," replied Moriarty. "Mrs. Driscoll had a postcard. I'm to meet
the train wid the car. Now, Miss Effie, here's your cloak, and on you
put it."
"Bother," said Miss French as Moriarty picked up the discarded cloak
from the ground.
She put it on, and they resumed their way, till they reached the boa.
This, too, was grumblingly put on, and they resumed their way till they
came on the great hat lying on the ground.
Moriarty placed the elastic of this under the child's chin and gave the
crown a slight twitch to put it straight.
With the putting on of the hat Miss French's light-hearted look and
gaiety, which had dwindled on the assumption of the cloak and boa,
completely vanished, like a candle-flame under an extinguisher.
Mrs. Driscoll met them at the door.
"That's right, Moriarty," said she. "You haven't let the hat off her,
have you?"
"She tuck it off," said Moriarty, "and I put it on her head again wid me
own hands. What's that you say? Have I kep' her out of the wind? Which
wind d'y mane, or what are you talkin' about? Here you are, take her
into the house, for I have me stables to look afther, and it's close on
wan."
Mrs. Driscoll disappeared into the house, bearing in her arms the last
of the Frenches. Poor child! If anyone ever stood a chance of being
killed by kindness, it was she.
Muffled to death!
Many an invalid has gone through that martyrdom and sure process of
extinction.