The sea-fog had crept up from the harbour towards evening, and it fell in heavy drops from the trees upon Willy and me as we walked down the avenue after dinner to see the bonfire. There was no moon visible, but the milky atmosphere held some luminous suggestion of past or coming light. It was a still night; we could hear the low booming of the sea in the caves below the old graveyard, and the nearer splashing of the rising tide among the Durrus rocks.
“There’s no sound I hate like that row the ground-swell makes out there at the point,” said Willy. “If you’re feeling any way lonely, it makes you want to hang yourself.”
“I like it,” I said, stopping to listen. “I often lie awake and listen to it these nights, when the westerly wind is blowing.”
“Maybe you’d get enough of doing that if you were here by yourself for a bit, and knew you’d got to stop here. I tell you you’ve no notion what this place is like in the winter. Sometimes there’s not a creature in the country to speak to from one month’s end to another.”
“I ought to know something about it by this time.”
“You think you do,” he answered, with a short laugh. “But you can’t very well know what it was like before you came, no more than you can tell what it will be like when you’re gone.”
We moved on again.
“Cannot you ever get away?” I asked sympathetically.
“No; how could I leave the governor? I tell you,” he went on, “that if you were boxed up here with no one to talk to but him, you’d go anywhere for company.” He stopped for a moment. “Do you know that, before you came here last October, I was as near making a fool of myself as ever a chap was”—breaking off again, but continuing before I could speak—“I believe I didn’t care a hang what I did with myself then. I suppose you’ll think that I’m an ass, but it’s very hard to have no one at all who cares about you.”
“I am sure it must be,” I said, feeling very uncomfortable, and walking quickly on.