Collected Short Stories. Patrick O’Brian
dreadfulness of the coins on the far side dribbling down to irrecoverable loss in the deep water. With a violent, epileptic jerk he leapt to rescue them. There was no need: they lay in a few inches of water on the side of a turf that had gone in before. The surprising chill of the water checked him, and he stood there gasping, with his sense coming back. Bending, he peered under the dark bank: the earth had fallen away from a stone chest buried deep in the mound; three sides of it and its lid still stood there, canted outwards by long subsidence to such a degree that no single coin remained. The fourth side and a long sliver of flawed stone from the bottom of the chest had fallen under the immense weight of the gold. His mind digested this while he drew breath, and at once he was back with one foot on the bank and the other on the stone slab, saying, ‘Easy now, old Woollen. Steady does it,’ and picking up gold with both hands. He worked with immense speed at first, but as his natural phlegm began to reassert itself even in the smallest degree he arranged them in neat piles, counting as he did so.
His first wild flurry of spirits, painful in its intensity, calmed, to be succeeded by an all-embracing happiness. This vast hoard was his. He had not the first glimmering of a doubt there. Plans formed and reformed with lightning rapidity in his head; he lost count of the hundreds. He came up on to the bank among the piles to count again, and he suddenly found himself trembling with weariness.
The sun came out, and the gold sent back its light, not a coin but what was brilliant; no tarnish, no obscuring dust. Woollen sat among the heaps, passing the gold through his hands. It was not Armada gold, as he had expected; there were a few Roman aurei, some Greek staters, among them coins of a beauty that struck him even then, and a mass of thick, unintelligible rounds that he supposed to be Oriental. There was no silver, no bronze. Gold; all gold.
He knew that he could not possibly carry a tenth part of it, and while he was weighing in his mind the ways of dealing with it he was possessed with the idea that he might already have been seen – some lurker in an illicit still, some chance wandering youth in the mountainside. He did not ever suppose that there might be other things in the valley watching him, measuring his breath, weighing his shadows: silent things like a round bank of fern or a crag at a vantage point, incessantly recording, communicating with each other, collating, storing up.
There were stills in the neighbourhood, he knew very well. The gleam of the hoard – how it flashed and shone; it would catch a man’s eye five miles away. With a chill on his soul he covered some with his coat, strewed the broken tangle over more, tore up bushes to cover the rest. He stared searchingly at the mountains, down the two ridges; there was no movement, only a kestrel hanging in the wind. The valley behind him was empty.
‘I must not dig. They would see the marks …’ His mind’s voice trailed off in an anguish of frustration. Illumination came: he sprang down into the water again and tore lumps from the fallen earth. Then leaning under the still overhanging bank to the great chest he levelled its floor with clods, piled it high with gold, built up a wall of stones and turf to serve for the fallen sides, and crammed the chest again. The slab, lest it should draw notice, he moved with a strength that he had never known before, and plunged it into the deep swirling middle water.
Some gold remained, enough to buy half the County Mayo. He dug among the bushes, in spite of his fear; he dug with his hands and slashed the roots with his knife. There was little trace when he had done. By now his mind was running fast and clear. ‘I will go over to Ballyatha,’ he said, ‘and I will sell four or five at Power’s there. Then I will buy some decent clothes and have dinner at the Connaught. To-morrow I will send some to the big London dealers, and when I have the money …’ There were so many possible variations that his mind stumbled in a happy indecision.
He was ready. A dozen very thick coins weighed down the pockets of his coat. The sun was well down the sky but if he hurried he could reach Ballyatha in time. It was clearly essential that he should not be cheated of one day’s happiness; it was less clear how getting to Ballyatha affected the safety of everything, but he was entirely certain that it did. The way was over the pass between Slieve Donagh and Ardearg, right up the valley and over the curtain of rock that closed its upper end. A chasm, not six feet wide – a man could touch each side with outstretched arms – and twenty yards long formed the pass, and below it on the far side was the town.
There was no path: he toiled upwards with his eyes fixed on the skyline. When he had gone a quarter of a mile he spun round, ran in long bounds downhill to the water, to the chest, grasped handfuls of gold, stuffed his pockets, his trout-bag, hurled the fish away. Then, breathing in great uneven gasps, he turned his face to the pass again and forced his labouring body up and up, on for ever, always uphill and the short grass slippery like glass.
He must get there in time, everything depended on it. The weight was more than he could bear and the pass was infinitely high above. The sun hurried down. Woollen, the unfortunate man in all his days, pressed on and on, and still the everlasting hill stretched above and beyond him. A despairing glance over his shoulder at the sun as it dipped made him stumble and fall. The wind chilled his soaking body. On and on: not to look up: on, on, on. He did look up, and the pass in the dusk was before him.
But in the pass he met the keeper of the hoard.
THE NIGHT WAS OLD, black, and full of driving cold rain; the moon and the stars had already passed over the sky. But anyhow they had been hidden since midnight by the low, racing, torn cloud and the flying wetness of small rain and sea-foam and the whipped-off top of standing water. Dawn was still far away: from the dark east the mounting wind blew in gusts; it bore more rain flatlings from the sea.
Bent double, with the breath caught from his mouth, a man struggled against the force of the living wind. He walked on the top of a sea-wall that guarded the reclamation of a great marsh. At this point the wall ran straight into the teeth of the wind for a long way; there was no shelter. He had to walk carefully, for the mud had not frozen yet, and it was treacherous going. Behind him his dog, an old black Labrador, picked its way, whining in a little undertone to itself when the way was very dirty.
A great blast came, halting him in mid-stride; he staggered and stepped back to keep his balance. The dog’s paw came under his heel and there was a yelp, but he heard nothing of it for the roaring of the wind. He leaned against it, and it bore him up with a living resilience, suddenly slackening, so that he stumbled again. The false step jerked a grunt out of him.
Thrusting his chin down into the scarf under his high-buttoned collar and shifting the weight of his gun, the man pushed on. All his mind was taken up with his fight; every long, firm step was a victory in little. The hardness of his way and the unceasing clamour at his ears had taken away every other thought. He was hardly aware of the places where the driven wet had pierced through, above his knees, down one side of his neck, and on his shoulder where the strap of his cartridge bag crossed over. Earlier on he had been irked by the weight of the bag and by the drag of the gun in the crook of his arm, but now he did not heed them at all; the wind was the single, embracing enemy.
At last the sea-wall turned right-handed, running along the south face of the saltings. At the corner he stooped and slid on all fours down the steep side into the lee. At once it seemed to him that some enormous machine had stopped; in the quiet air he breathed freely, and sighed as he squatted in the mud. The Labrador shook itself and thrust its muzzle into his relaxed hand. Absently the man felt for its ears, but the dog was insistent; the custom must be fulfilled. When he had changed the hang of the strap on his aching shoulder the man searched under his macintosh among the scarves and pullovers for an inner pocket; he found half a biscuit and his pipe. The flare of the match in his cupped hands showed his face momentarily, in flashes, as he sucked the flame down; it showed disembodied in the darkness, high cheekbones and jutting nose thrown into distorted prominence. The foul pipe bubbled, but the acrid tobacco was instantly satisfying; he drew and inhaled deeply for a few moments.
‘Well, that’s the first leg,’ he said to the dog as he got up. He went on under the lee of the sea-wall, walking heavily in the deep, uneven mud. Further on there was a place where he had