Then he shook hands with me.
“Thank you, Andy,” we said, both together, and then I beckoned Dick and whispered to him.
We went back to breakfast in my rooms, and sat down as happy a party as could be, the only one not quite comfortable at first being Andy. He and Dick both came in quite hot and flushed. Dick pointed to him:
“He’s an obstinate, truculent villain, is Andy! Why, I had to almost fight him to make him come in. Now, Andy, no running away; it is Miss Norah’s will.” And Andy subsided bashfully into a seat. It was fully several minutes before he either smiled or winked. We had a couple of hours to pass before it became time to leave for Folkestone; and when breakfast was over, one and then another said a few kindly words. Dick opened the ball by speaking most beautifully of our own worthiness, and of how honestly and honorably each had won the other, and of the long life and happiness that lay, he hoped and believed, before us. Then Joyce spoke a few manly words of love for his daughter and his pride in her. The tears were in his eyes when he said how his one regret in life was that her dear mother had to look down from Heaven her approval on this day, instead of sharing it among us as the best of mothers and the best of women. Then Norah turned to him and laid her head on his breast and cried a little — not unhappily, but happily, as a bride should cry at leaving those she loves for one she loves better still.
Of course both the lawyers spoke, and Eugene said a few words bashfully. I was about to reply to them all, when Andy got up and crystallised the situation in a few words.
“Miss Norah an’ yer ‘an’r, I’d like, if I might make so bould, to say a wurrd fur all the men and weemen in Ireland that ayther iv yez iver kem across. I often heerd iv fairies, an’ Masther Art knows well how he hunted wan from the top iv Knocknacar to the top iv Knockcalltecrore, and I won’t say a wurrd about the kind iv a fairy he wanted to find — not even in her quare kind iv an eye — bekase I might be overlooked, as the masther was; and, more betoken, since I kem here Masther Dick has tould me that I’m to be yer ‘an’r’s Irish coachman. Hurroo! an’ I might get evicted from that same houldin’ fur me impidence in tellin’ tales iv the Masther before he was married; but I’ll promise yez both that there’ll be no man from the Giant’s Causeway to Cape Clearwhat’ll thry, an’ thry hardher, to make yer feet walk an’ yer wheels rowl in aisy ways than meself. I’m takin’ a liberty, I know, be sayin’ so much, but plase God, ye’ll walk yer ways wid honor an’ wid peace, believin’ in aich other an’ in God; an’ may he bless ye both, an’ yer childher, and yer childher’s childher to folly ye. An’ if iver ayther iv yez wants to shtep into glory over a man’s body, I hope ye’ll not look past poor ould Andy Sullivan!”
Andy’s speech was quaint, but it was truly meant, for his heart was full of quick sympathy, and the honest fellow’s eyes were full of tears as he concluded.
Then Miss Joyce’s health was neatly proposed by Mr. Chapman and responded to in such a way by Mr. Caicy that Norah whispered to me that she would not be surprised if aunt took up her residence in Galway before long.
And now the hour was come to say good-bye to all friends. We entered our carriage and rolled away, leaving behind us waving hands, loving eyes, and hearts that beat most truly.
And the great world lay before us with all the possibilities of happiness that men and women may win for themselves. There was never a cloud to shadow our sunlit way; and we felt that we were one.
The Watter’s Mou’
First published: 1895
Chapter 1
It threatened to be a wild night. All day banks of sea-fog had come and gone, sweeping on shore with the south-east wind, which is so fatal at Cruden Bay, and indeed all along the coast of Aberdeenshire, and losing themselves in the breezy expanses of the high uplands beyond. As yet the wind only came in puffs, followed by intervals of ominous calm; but the barometer had been falling for days, and the sky had on the previous night been streaked with great ‘mare’s-tails’ running in the direction of the dangerous wind. Up to early morning the wind had been south-westerly, but had then ‘backed’ to south-east; and the sudden change, no less than the backing, was ominous indeed. From the waste of sea came a ceaseless muffled roar, which seemed loudest and most full of dangerous import when it came through the mystery of the driving fog. Whenever the fog-belts would lift or disperse, or disappear inland before the gusts of wind, the sea would look as though swept with growing anger; for though there were neither big waves as during a storm, nor a great swell as after one, all the surface of the water as far as the eye could reach was covered with little waves tipped with white. Closer together grew these waves as the day wore on, the angrier ever the curl of the white water where they broke. In the North Sea it does not take long for the waves to rise; and all along the eastern edge of Buchan it was taken for granted that there would be wild work on the coast before the night was over.
In the little look-out house on the top of the cliff over the tiny harbour of Port Erroll the coastguard on duty was pacing rapidly to and fro. Every now and again he would pause, and, lifting a field-glass from the desk, sweep the horizon from Girdleness at the south of Aberdeen, when the lifting of the mist would let him see beyond the Scaurs, away to the north, where the high cranes of the Blackman quarries at Murdoch Head seemed to cleave the sky like gigantic gallows-trees.
He was manifestly in high spirits, and from the manner in which, one after another, he looked again and again at the Martini-Henry rifle in the rack, the navy revolver stuck muzzle down on a spike, and the cutlass in its sheath hanging on the wall, it was easy to see that his interest arose from something connected with his work as a coastguard. On the desk lay an open telegram smoothed down by his hard hands, with the brown envelope lying beside it. It gave some sort of clue to his excitement, although it did not go into detail. “Keep careful watch tonight; run expected; spare no efforts; most important.”
William Barrow, popularly known as Sailor Willy, was a very young man to be a chief boatman in the preventive service, albeit that his station was one of the smallest on the coast. He had been allowed, as a reward for saving the life of his lieutenant, to join the coast service, and had been promoted to chief boatman as a further reward for a clever capture of smugglers, wherein he had shown not only great bravery, but much ability and power of rapid organisation.
The Aberdeen coast is an important one in the way of guarding on account of the vast number of fishing-smacks which, during the season, work from Peterhead up and down the coast, and away on the North Sea right to the shores of Germany and Holland. This vast coming and going affords endless opportunities for smuggling; and, despite of all vigilance, a considerable amount of ‘stuff finds its way to the consumers without the formality of the Custom House. The fish traffic is a quick traffic, and its returns come all at once, so that a truly enormous staff would be requisite to examine adequately the thousand fishing-smacks which use the harbour of Peterhead, and on Sundays pack its basins with a solid mass of boats. The coast-line for some forty miles south is favourable for this illicit traffic. The gneiss and granite formations broken up by every convulsion of nature, and worn by the strain and toil ages into every conceivable form of rocky beauty, offers an endless variety of narrow creeks and bays where the daring, to whom rocks and the currents and the tides are known, may find