The Golden Ocean. Patrick O’Brian
are not,’ cried Peter and Liam together: the first said it in a wondering tone; the second without much conviction.
‘I am, too,’ said Sean, trotting evenly by the horse’s side with the shoes bumping rhythmically against his broad chest as they dangled from their string.
‘You are not,’ said his uncle again, but only from a spirit of contradiction.
‘I am,’ said Sean; and Peter, who knew that otherwise this conversation might continue indefinitely, interrupted with, ‘Did your father say you could go?’
Sean turned up his big open face and said, ‘And would I be so wicked and undutiful as to go off from my own country without my father’s permission and his Reverence’s blessing? Would I not think it the great shame for ever, to be stealing away like a polecat?’
At the sight of so much righteousness Peter was almost certain that Sean was lying, and he said directly, ‘Did your father truly say that you might go? And did my father approve?’
‘Ah,’ said Sean with a leap and a jerk that made Placidus stagger and change step. ‘Oh,’ he cried, ‘it is hard to be after running twenty miles across the mountain and over the bog and then to be called a renegado, no less.’
‘It is no more than seven,’ said Liam, ‘and he has no leave of anybody but the empty wind.’
‘Listen, Sean,’ said Peter. ‘Did your father say you could go?’
‘Am I not telling you?’ cried Sean, boiling with frustration and shaking the patient horse until it tottered. ‘Did I not say to my Da, “Will I go?” and did he not say, “You will”? And did not his Reverence encourage my heart with his noble description of the free and magnificent life in his royal Majesty’s imperial fleet? “Sail forth young man,” cries his reverend honour and he pacing back and forth in the small parlour itself. “Sail with the royal navy into the golden ocean, far into the golden sea.”’
‘“The golden ocean, the golden sea”,’ cried Peter. ‘Did he say that indeed, Sean, now?’
‘He did,’ said Sean, pleased with the reception of his words. ‘“Sail on the golden waves of the west until you can touch the sun with your hand,” says he, “and my younger son Peter, that elegant boy, will give you his protection if you attend to your duty.”’
‘It does not sound like my father—God bless him—at all….’
‘God bless him,’ they cried, Liam raising his hat.
‘… except for the ocean, the broad, golden sea.’ Peter went on. ‘He was saying a word of the same kind to me, about a golden voyage and a place called Colchis—he was saying that I must make my way there myself.’
‘It is to Cork we are going,’ said Liam in a pragmatical tone—‘to Cork by way of Derrynacaol: and not to any Colchis at all.’
‘Where is this Colchis?’ asked Sean, intensely interested.
‘Oh, in Greece, sure, or somewhat behind it,’ said Peter. ‘It is all in the book. But I do not have it clear in my mind—there was this gold in the tree, and a dragon and a wise-woman who was beautiful, the king’s daughter. It is William who would tell it: he can read the Greek and the Latin like any archbishop.’
‘It was long ago, I am sure?’
‘Why, surely it must have been.’
‘Before Saint Patrick, maybe?’
‘Perhaps so, Sean—very likely indeed, from what I recall.’
‘In the time of the Tuatha De Danaan, perhaps it was?’
‘Ah, Sean, I cannot tell you. You should ask William—he is the great scholar, with his podarkees Achilles and his hic hac horum.’
‘I wish,’ said Sean, looking down for a while and watching his bare feet running—‘I wish I could read the Greek.’
‘Read the Greek, is it?’ cried Liam with strong indignation. ‘Oh, the serpent. The impudent toad. Many and many a time have I said to my poor sister—and she quite demented with tales of his misconduct—I have said to her, “If you will not cut the comb of that young cock he will end on the gallows, like many another unpromising reptile, and then we’ll hear of him going for a soldier in King Lewis’s army of Papists, where he will be knocked on the head out of hand and shot through the body with flintlocks and pikes. He will be brought back and tried for foreign enlistment and treason and they will hang him at the four roads of Ballynasaggart. Let him be put to a respectable master,” I said, “and let us hear no more of this running up and down and playing the fiddle and making of rhymes or jingles in Irish—it is bad enough to be speaking it in private the way no one can hear us, but to write it in sheets …”’
‘What is wrong with the Gaelic?’
‘It is a language of servants. And it is not good enough even for them. What kind of a place can a servant get and he speaking nothing but Irish like something that has come in out of the bog?’
‘It was once the language of kings.’
‘I spit on your kings. It was never the language of commerce.’
‘It is the language they are speaking in Paradise.’
‘It is not. Some few very poor and ignorant angels with hardly a feather on them yet might still speak a few words of it in the dark corners of Heaven; but the language that is rightly spoken there, is the English.’
‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘Irish is good enough for me.’
‘Your honour will please himself,’ said Liam sharply, ‘but when we meet the young gentleman in Derrynacaol I hope that your father’s son will not make me blush by speaking the servants’ language.’
‘But Sean now,’ cried Peter, returning to the point that had been at the back of his mind, ‘if my father said all this, why did he not tell me? And why did you not start with us? You might have borrowed Clancy’s mare, and your uncle Liam would have taken her back with Placidus. And what is your baggage apart from Patrick Kearney’s cloak for such an enormous voyage—and I wish you may have got it from him fairly. Have you a letter at least to recommend you to Mr Walter, Sean?’
‘I have the shoes,’ replied Sean, ‘and before Derrynacaol I will be putting them on.’
Derrynacaol: it was two full days’ journey from Ballynasaggart to Derrynacaol, far out of the country of Peter’s knowledge, but they were to try to reach it in a day and a half, for the great horse-fair was held at that time of the year and it would have been the world’s pity to pass by without seeing anything of it. They would arrive in the afternoon of Wednesday if they travelled by moonlight, and they would be in time for the races.
‘It is the race they call the Town Race that we must see,’ said Liam as they went up the white road of Slieve Alan, ‘for that is the great race and the town gives a silver bell to the winner.’
‘Are they very fine horses, Liam?’
‘Are they very fine horses? They are the best in the world, my dear, fit for Julius Caesar or the Lord Lieutenant, and there is half Ireland lining the course and cheering the winner. Why, even the worst and the last of the creatures that run there would be like a comet in Ballynasaggart and it would put the mock on Cormac O’Neil’s brown gelding, the ill-shaped thief.’
‘I wish I could ride in a race like that,’ said Sean, who was up behind his uncle for a rest from the road.
‘Pooh,’ said Liam. ‘A great long-boned, tick-bellied slob of a thing like you? Those tall and stately magnificent horses would bend to the earth. No indeed: unless the gentry who own them are as light as may be they have little jockey-boys who weigh no more than an owl. For they are mad to win this race, do you see? And not an ounce will they carry that they can spare. It is not only the honour of bearing the bell away, but each gentleman